Sunday Poems

Starting in 2005, game designer Raph Koster decided to post a poem to his popular blog every Sunday. Ten years later, this is a selection of eighty of those poems, accompanied by gorgeous pen-and-ink illustrations and illuminating endnotes.

These are verses written to an audience that didn’t necessarily care about poetry; verses about whatever was happening that week. They comment on the news, on his children’s homework, on books he was reading or music he heard. In them we voyage across the world, or deep inside apples; we see a toddler become a pterodactyl, and clouds become mundane water vapor. We see sonnets written in computer code.

These are poems for everyday people about ordinary things made extraordinary.

• In these engaging poems, which tease the conventions of formal verse, Raph Koster shines a curiosity laser on topics ranging from the building of the Globe Theatre to the BASIC programming language. Koster memorializes far-flung journeys through such locales as mountainous Afghanistan, exurban China, Las Vegas casinos, and a very real-seeming Seoni jungle visited not IRL but through Kipling and gaming.
  —Tarin Towers, author of Sorry, We’re Close
• On a stormy night in Tuscaloosa, reading Raph Koster’s collection of poems: I congratulate you on the sustained and sustaining enthusiasm, joy, play, and wit at work in these poems. In your poems – as in the gaming world – you’ve created a richly varied world saturated with myth and stories.
  —Hank Lazer, poet, author of The New Spirit and N18 (complete)

Raph Koster was born in 1971, has lived in four countries and over a half-dozen different states, and is married with two kids. He holds a bachelor's degree from Washington College in English/creative writing and in Spanish, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the University of Alabama. While in college, he also spent time studying most everything in the humanities, including music theory and composition and studio art. He is a past member of the famed Turkey City science fiction writing workshop. His music has been featured on television, and he has released one album, After the Flood. Raph is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He's been the lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies; a venture-backed entrepreneur heading his own studio; and he's contributed design work, writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles ranging from Facebook games to single-player games for handheld consoles. His book A Theory of Fun for Game Design is one of the undisputed classics in the games field. In 2012, he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online. This award recognizes the career and achievements of one particular creator who has made an indelible impact on the craft of online game development. Visit his website at http: //www.raphkoster.com or follow him on Twitter at @raphkoster.