Habitat Chronicles

Sometime circa 1993...

For those who didn't know, yesterday was Ada Lovelace's Birthday, and many of us that have blogs are writing a post about a woman of note in technology. I thought about my selection long and hard, as I know an amazing number of pioneering women doing amazing work who I admire and aspire-to greatly. After much thought, I went with someone in my area of specialization - social media. Someone who has been in the trenches learning about how people interact in real-time for more than 15 years. I chose Amy Susan Bruckman, because we share this particular road: the pursuit of improving mankind's social interactions using computers and networks as intermediating tools.

Not many people were involved with virtual worlds, graphical or textual, in the late 1980s through 1990s. So few, in fact, that several of us formed something we called the Cyberspace Cabal - Pavel Curtis, Chip Morningstar, Amy Bruckman, and myself (with others joining over the few brief years we corresponded). We were the founders of a group hoping to help pound out the terminology of the future of real-time human computer mediated communications. Then came the World Wide Web in 1993 and over the next few years everything began to change. The Cabal drifted apart.

Most histories of MUD/MOO only give a brief mention to Amy's first world - MediaMOO, which was established for media researchers to network and share research and best practices. It even served as the testbed for one of the first experiments in virtual community self-governance with the formation of all-user elected ruling council. MediaMOO fostered many other experiments in collaborative object creation that provided many lessons that are echoed in modern virtual worlds such as Second Life today.

Amy carried these insights on into her graduate work at MIT, where she spawned a new derivative of the MOO platform called MOOSE Crossing - designed especially for children to create their own virtual objects, complete with programmable behaviors. In fact, my son created some of his first working code in that world.

Since then, she has moved from MIT to Georgia Tech where continues the good fight for making computers accessible tools for children and the masses by establishing the Electronic Learning Communities lab and the Opportunities in Computing program to house all the great work by her and now her students.

Though she's already received numerous awards from her peers for being a pioneer in this area, I chose to single her out today for her unwavering and clear focus on the positive benefits on online community and for her continued personal efforts to keep the research community connected.

Thanks for being there Amy! Especially back when most academics were dismissing online community work as being only "by men, for men."

(See the wikipedia article on her for all the links and details that probably should have been in this tribute.)

AdaLovelaceDay09

Education | Posted by Randy at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

I (Randy) will be leading a session on Reputation and Context at the Online Community Business Forum in Sonoma, Califonia on March 19th and 20th.

My session is currently scheduled to be an hour-long breakout at 2:30 on the 19th. I'm currently thinking of limiting the amount of context-setting material to about 10 minutes and having the rest be a working session for helping people sort out their reputation contexts, models, and abuse mitigation issues. If you're planning on attending, feedback here about what you'd like to see from my session is strongly desired - leave a comment below or drop me an email.

I've attended the ForumOne Community events for several years now and found them to be invaluable. This year should be no exception. The program is still evolving, but already has an impressive list of innovators and stalwarts of Online Communities speaking and leading sessions.

Some seats are still available. Just visit the OCBF Registration page, enter the password sonoma and the discount code farmer at checkout and you will save $150.00

Speaking | Posted by Randy at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)

Recently, GameSetWatch published an excerpt from Rogue Leaders about Lucasfilm's Habitat which includes several new images and wonderful details.

Unfortunately, it also contains several factual and categorical errors that need to be corrected in the public record since this book's account has already been used to incorrectly update Habitat's Wikipedia page.

This article will block-quote the relevant sections of the book, followed by factual corrections marked as FACT CHECK: or commentary marked with either Chip: or Randy: as appropriate.

Q-Link, as it was known, undercut that price to around $3.60 an hour by renting out spare, unused server space during low-usage times.

FACT CHECK: The underused, and therefore discounted, resource was not servers, but off-peak packet-switching network bandwidth.

Through this partnership a deal was hatched to produce an online game, with Lucasfilm Games creating the front-end game -- Habitat -- on the Commodore 64, and Q-Link producing the back-end, server-side software.

FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm also developed a large portion of the backend. Q-Link, lead by Janet Hunter, did the stuff that had to interface with their system, but Lucasfilm did the game-specific stuff.

Designer Noah Falstein had been working with one of the team engineers, Chip Morningstar, on the game concept.

Chip: That's a little backwards. The original concept emerged from a collaboration between Noah and me, but the design itself was mine. We were all peers with the same title, "Designer/Programmer", with an equal emphasis on concept and implementation.

Randy: See Chip's post on the beginnings of Habitat for a detailed account those early days.

The game debuted internally at Lucasfilm Games at a company meeting in early 1988.

...

It looked like Habitat was a huge hit-in-the-making, and so in the fall of 1988 the beta was taken to a New York nightclub for a launch party as Lucasfilm Games and Q-Link prepared to revolutionize gaming.

FACT CHECK: Summer and Fall 1986, after the game had first been shown to selected industry and press people at the Chicago CES in June.

Randy: Watch the Habitat Promotional Video and it's copyright date for verification.

Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network's entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack's Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. "The way the system was built, the server software wasn't capable of hosting that population while still being successful," recalls Arnold.

Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.

From a business perspective, however, Habitat wasn't a failure. The game was licensed to Fujitsu for use on its FM Towns PC-like platform, and the successor to Habitat was recast (with several of the original planned features now cut) as Corpe Caribe, described as an online Club Med, where it enjoyed some success.

FACT CHECK: The shipped product was Club Caribe, not "Corpe Caribe". :: sigh ::

Chip: While there were some performance tuning issues that needed to be addressed, the cost of operations was never really the issue. Statements about performance considerations were a face saving way of covering for the what Q-Link perceived as the real problem, which was marketing risk. Basically, the product was so weird and out of the mainstream that they didn't think they knew how to sell it. In particular, for some reason they felt that people would be put off by the fantasy and science fiction elements. We argued that this defied everything we knew from the history of computer games, but they believed their typical user was far more conventional and unimaginative than the typical game purchaser.

FACT CHECK: Club Caribe was Habitat and it was released commercially by Q-Link. It opened in January 1988 with the name change and a different marketing spin. Literally the only difference between the original Habitat client software and the Club Caribe software as shipped was the title screen image.

Chip: Basically, Q-Link reworked the world database to remove any of the objects that had any kind of fantasy or science fictional flavor. The idea was to make the world seem more ordinary, pitching it as a virtual resort. Notably, they didn't use any avatar heads that were non-human.

Chip: Over the course of the first six months of operation, as they grew more comfortable with their users, all these pointless restrictions were eventually abandoned.

The licensing to Fujitsu for the FM Towns happened a couple years later.

Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, the two programming gurus who had built the system infrastructure

Chip and Randy: That's a slight mischaracterization of our role. While we certainly programmed it, we think it's more noteworthy that Chip designed the whole thing, and Randy ran the world. Both the design itself and our operational experience with it are arguably quite a bit more important to the historical significance of Habitat than was its implementation.

Randy: Well, except that we managed to get a virtual world client shoe-horned into a 1-megahertz, 300-baud, 64k-memory computer with a 165k floppy disk! Certainly not a fact of wide ranging repercussions, but still pretty damn impressive.

History | Posted by Randy at 02:45 PM | Comments (5)