F. Randall "Randy" Farmer
<box red| TBD>Wow! I shifted voice all over here. Rewrite. This looks more like a biography or wikipedia entry. Maybe use it for that.</box>
At the dawn of the personal computer age, I was a teenager. Even since then, when I was using telephone handsets to connect to remote computers to create and play games, I have always been fascinated by using these interconnected machines to facilitate communication between people.
Like the Internet boom in the 1990's, the personal computer boom of the late 1970s to early 1980s saw accelerating (and incompatible) developments in software and hardware, which meant that it was impossible to get a formal education supporting the technology that was being sold at the local Radio Shack. Randy started attending The Macomb County Community College while still a sophomore at Henry Ford II High School in an attempt to compensate for the lack of appropriate software classes being available. Even there he found that the curriculum was sorely lacking. In 1976, Randy connected with another sophomore named Doug Dragin who'd been trying to make a two-player text-based game based on Star Trek, which was too ambitious for his skills. Randy got excited when he saw that this game, called SPB (for Space Battle) was exactly the kind of human-to-human interaction that he was looking for: Something only a computer could do to connect people, in this case, in a shared fictional context. Randy proposed a partnership to build the game and to expand it from being two-player to being multi-player, where high school students could log in from around the state, or someday the world to pretend to be Captain Kirk of the Federation or Commander Kang of the Klingon Empire. Randy was learning some the sales skills from his father - once he'd either developed, or more often adopted, a vision he would set about to convince those around him how compelling and righteous this project would be. He would hone these skills throughout his entire career without doing so consciously. In the case of SPB, Randy and Doug set out to produce it and shared it through a word-of-mouth network to nearby high schools. When the Macomb Instructional School District sent out the word that there was to be a county-wide programming contest, SPB was submitted and won second place. Ultimately this lead to Randy, and then Doug getting jobs, from when they were still juniors, and becoming professional programmers before they graduated in 1979. Then the personal computer revolution exploded, and college was simply not an option - people who could write educational or game code were in high demand.
After moving out to California in 1980, Randy briefly attended the University of San Francisco udner the University President's Scholarship, where the curriculum problem continued. He was bored by Advanced Fortran and being teacher assistants for classes in programming languages he'd never actually learned (they were pretty much all the same) and continued writing educational software on the side. Finally, it became clear that it wasn't about the technology of how people communicate. It was about the psychology. He switched his major to Instructional Psychology and finally started learning about how people learn from their world, and how they think about what they do. After completing only about half of the requirements for his bachelors, the scholarship ran out and the lure of the software industry was finally too strong - he dropped out, got married, and became a life-long social software engineer and designer.
Along the way I worked along side many outstanding folks as we created: one of the first forums, the first Trek MUD, the first graphical MMO with the first avatars, the first virtual information marketplace, the first fully distributed virtual world platform, the first no-plugin web session platform, Yahoo’s 360-degrees social network, reputation system, and Yahoo!'s Open Strategy.
I have contributed to many papers and books about how humans interact in these computer mediated social contexts we keep creating. The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, which I co-authored with Chip Morningstar has been republished in over a dozen books in several languages.
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This article has a good summary of Randy Farmer's work and recognition received: 1 Items of note:
- Lucasfilm's habitat was pioneering: “the first virtual world”
- The paper, “The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat” has been widely sited
- Farmer later consulted on several incarnations of Habitat over the years: “Club Caribe in 1989, and later in Japan as Fujitsu Habitat in 1990. In 1995, CompuServe’s WorldsAway also used the Habitat technology”
- Moved on to AMiX, “the “world's first (pre-Internet) online information marketplace”, as well as the “world's first email-based consulting system”.”
- Cofounder of electric communities, later known as communities.com, which, developed the E programming language and ran The Palace for a few years, among other things
- Live Producer for The Sims Online at Maxis
- Community Design Consultant on Second Life
- “Nowadays, both Morningstar and Farmer work at Yahoo!, developing online communities.”. Article on current work here: 2
By way of notability, Raph Koster sites many Habitat related resources 5 – I'd say this indicates the notability of the project to the field, as viewed by one of the industry's most well-known players.
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