The Rise Of Virtual Communities_In Conversation Wi
The Rise of Virtual Communities_In Conversation wi
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The Rise of Virtual Communities_In Conversation with Virtual World Pioneers
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The Rise Of Virtual Communities_In Conversation Wi
"Uncover the fascinating history of virtual communities and how we connect to each other online. The Rise of Virtual Communities, explores the earliest online community platforms, mapping the technological evolutions, and the individuals, that have shaped the culture of the internet.
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1. Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer
Cocreators of Lucasfilm Games “Habitat”
Amber Atherton1
(1)
San Francisco, CA, USA
“Habitat” was the first massively multiplayer online game (MMO) and virtual world cocreated
by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer in 1985 while they were working at Lucasfilm.
Interacting through text chat and moving around a graphical environment, users bartered for
objects and eventually created self-government – creating rules independent of the server
operators – forming the first social virtual world. Morningstar coined the term “avatar” for the
online representations of Habitat users. Morningstar and Farmer encouraged innumerable
possibilities within Habitat, allowing users to drive the direction of design and Lucasfilm to
facilitate. “Habitat” ran from 1986 to 1988, eventually closing due to unviable costs. In 1988, a
downsized version called Club Caribe was shipped preinstalled on the Commodore 64.1 The
software was later licensed and launched in Japan as “Fujitsu Habitat.”
“Habitat” is widely acknowledged as foundational to present-day online community design,
particularly for immersive, 3D graphical environments. In 2017, the Museum of Art and Digital
Entertainment (MADE) supported Farmer in his restoration of “Habitat” (available to play
online at neohabitat.org), as part of a playable online video game museum.
Aside from “Habitat,” Morningstar and Farmer created what many agree to be the first
decentralized metaverse, in the late 1990s, while working at Electric Communities. Along with
Doug Crawford, they also created the JSON Protocol.
Atherton: Chip, Randy, you’ve built some incredible things together over the years. How did
you first meet?
Morningstar: I hired Randy to work on the development team for Habitat back at Lucasfilm;
I think it was 1985. He had been working for us as a contractor on our games and had done
a good job with those and worked quickly. I had finally received the go-ahead to begin hiring
for the product team. So I recruited Randy. It turned out he’d already been working on virtual
worlds since the dawn of time! Since then, we have worked together a lot over the years, not
just at Habitat. We’ve collaborated in many roles and consulted for some of the later
communities in this book, including for the Palace and Linden Lab, which owns Second Life.
Atherton: Randy, what virtual worlds had you already been working on? What was exciting
and emerging in online communities at the time?
,Farmer: I’ve been working in online communities since the 1970s. I cocreated a game, SPB,
where people in high school formed teams and logged in to a server.2 Each team had a text
terminal, into which you would type commands. Sadly, the cocreator passed away a couple
of years ago – that’s how old this is. Some friends have kept the game alive; the modern
version has port views and maps, but at its core, it is still the original game and is playable
online. I also have images of the source code for my first Bulletin Board
System (BBS), COMUNI, which dates from 1976. Through this BBS, I was connecting high
school students to play games. Back then, there was no centralized network like the Internet
for talking together.
Meanwhile, Richard Bartle in England was creating the first text multiuser game (MUG) in
1978, called MUD1. Simultaneously, the University of Illinois was building PLATO. 3 At this
time, I was using standard terminals, while the University of Illinois was using plasma screen
terminals, an expensive technology that was never widely adopted. All of these
developments were happening in parallel.
Morningstar: There were also several early online communities which simulated the future
through the use of money. PLATO was one of them, alongside what was developed at Xerox
PARC.4
Atherton: Before Lucasfilm’s Habitat, had you experienced any need for online community
moderation?
Farmer: I had a great interest in connecting humans online, to share a game experience or
to talk and communicate. At high school, a member of one of my message boards took to
trolling me, with what are now laughable insults but hurt a lot back then. He likened me to a
peanut butter sandwich… Nothing by comparison to what we suffer today online, but I
started learning about the challenges of auditing virtual communities in the late 1970s.
I had an idealism then, which I shared with my father, which was that the Internet would
connect everyone and that great things would happen. People would cooperate more. There
would be fewer wars. Now I’m not sure that throwing everyone into a big pile on the Internet
was good design. Over the years, I realized that the best communities are the ones that have
shared content, a shared purpose for existing, even if it’s temporary and on a smaller scale.
Atherton: How did the idea for Habitat come about as the first MMO?
Morningstar: The initial genesis was actually a lunchtime conversation between Noah
Falstein (a coworker at Lucasfilm) and I. We were discussing artificial intelligence in games,
which had a very different connotation back in those days. AI just meant the computerized
opponent that you would play a game against. My take was that we simply didn’t know how
to provide an opponent that players could interact with that had the richness, depth, and
subtle nuances of an actual human being. AI opponents could not be convincing. So I
suggested that we don’t even try. What if we used modems to connect real people, so they
could play against each other?
, That led to the idea which we initially called Lucasfilm’s “Universe.” It was an open world
space game, which anybody could connect up to and then interact with each other. We didn’t
have a clear concept of what the gameplay would be. I wrote up a two- or three-page project
proposal, which was how we pitched our ideas at Lucasfilm Games. The team would discuss
the proposal, and then it would be filed away in the General Manager Steve Arnold’s filing
cabinet. Then when clients approached Lucasfilm, shopping for projects, Arnold would gauge
the client’s brief and match it up against the catalogue of ideas in his filing cabinet. He’d pull
out a couple of these proposals and pitch them.
One of the driving constraints at Lucasfilm Games was that our mission statement was, “stay
small, be the best and don’t lose any money.” George Lucas, the founder of Lucasfilm and
creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, was clear on this. The result was that
we could build what we wanted, but we had to get somebody else to pay for it.
One day, Clive Smith, the VP for strategic planning at Commodore International, came
in.5 Commodore’s big initiative that year was going to be cheap modems for Commodore 64s.
As part of that, Commodore made a strategic investment in a company called Quantum Link,
which was a consumer-oriented online service. That in itself was pretty radical because it
was cheap, targeted at consumers, and used a client-server architecture which kept their
costs down. Commodore approached Lucasfilm asking if we had any ideas for what they
could do in the game space.
Steve pulled the “Universe” proposal out and I pitched it, which led to an extended
negotiation. After months of discussion, they funded what became known as Habitat, and
Lucasfilm mostly executed the project. It took months for the lawyers to settle on the terms
of the deal. In the meantime, I produced innumerable design documents. At one point, I had
a three-inch ring binder full of specifications and design material, a lot of which was not used
in the end. But it meant that we had thought through the ins and outs of Habitat ahead of
time. When issues came up in development, we had often already thought about that and so
had a leg up in solving whatever the problem was. We didn’t have a grand vision that
magically unfolded, we were making it up as we went along.
Atherton: How did the community begin to form in the early days around Habitat?
Farmer: Habitat went through some testing phases. It was initially internal, mostly
employees and a few companies. Then it went into alpha and paid beta. We invited a curated
group from existing Quantum Link users, who were interested. This led to some great
community formation. Habitat then went into wider beta testing around 1986.
We touch on this in our publications: Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Habitat Anecdotes.
We discuss that in a virtual world, where there is no strict “winner” or “rules,” we did need
some areas that were safe – that you could retreat from the threat of being killed – while
other areas were wild. We did several experiments on what worked best.
When you’re pioneering something – and none of these features existed in 1986 – that
something doesn’t even have a name yet. One of our biggest problems with Quantum
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