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28 May 19
Christopher AllenIt was @epopt + me in the Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, May 1990https://t.co/8H1PvFMmwq: "You can't trust anyone."
Play it yourself at https://t.co/M0F2oQkd1G pic.twitter.com/UUGGdokwKM
— F. Randall Farmer (@frandallfarmer) May 28, 2019 -
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akseliRunning a world
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15 Apr 11
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It was arguably one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment
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The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace
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We hope that the next generation of builders of virtual worlds can benefit from our experiences and (especially) from our mistakes.
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Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented.
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At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment.
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It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another.
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The players are represent by animated figures that we call "Avatars". Avatars are usually, though not exclusively, humanoid in appearance.
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Avatars can move around, pick up, put down and manipulate objects, talk to each other, and gesture, each under the control of an individual player.
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ATMs (Automatic Token Machines) enable access to an Avatar's bank account
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Most objects, however, have some function that they perform
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Vending machines dispense useful goods in exchange for Habitat money
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Many objects are portable and may be carried around in an Avatar's hands or pockets
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These include various kinds of containers, money, weapons, tools, and exotic magical implements.
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Book Document for Avatars to read (e.g., the -
daily newspaper
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Game piece Enables various board games: backgammon, checkers, chess, etc -
mail system
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Pawn machine Buys back previously purchased objects -
Sensor Various types, detects otherwise invisible conditions in the world -
Vendroid Vending machine; sells things -
At the heart of the Habitat implementation is an object-oriented model of the universe
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A multi-user environment is central to the idea of cyberspace.
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people seek in such a system is richness, complexity and depth.
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Nobody knows how to produce an automaton that even approaches the complexity of a real human being, let alone a society. Our approach, then, is not even to attempt this, but instead to use the computational medium to augment the communications channels between real people.
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Communications bandwidth is a scarce resource.
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telephone connection
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The law of supply and demand suggests that no matter how much capacity is available, you always want more
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the most significant part of what we wish to be communicating are human behaviors.
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An object-oriented data representation is essential.
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the basic objects from which you build the system should correspond more-or-less to the objects in the user's conceptual model of the virtual world, that is, people, places, and artifacts
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The goal is to enable the communications between machines take place primarily at the behavioral level (what people and things are doing) rather than at the presentation level (how the scene is changing
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The description of a place in the virtual would should be in terms of what is there rather than what it looks like
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The implementation platform is relatively unimportant.
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However, defining a virtual environment in terms of the configuration and behavior of objects, rather than their presentation, enables us to span a vast range of computational and display capabilities among the participants in a system
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At the high end, you might have a powerful processor that generates the image of the tree by growing a fractal model and rendering it three dimensions at high resolution, the finest details ray-traced in real time, complete with branches waving in the breeze and the sound of wind in the leaves coming through your headphones in high-fidelity digital stereo
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text adventure games
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if cyberspace is to become a significant communications medium (as we obviously think it should).
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Given that we see cyberspace as fundamentally a communications medium rather than simply a user interface model
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Data communications standards are vital.
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However, our concerns about cyberspace data communications standards center less upon data transport protocols than upon the definition of the data being transported
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We are concerned with the protocols for sending messages between objects, that is, for communicating behavior rather than presentation, and for communicating object definitions from one system to another.
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The first was the problem of creating a working piece of technology -- developing the animation engine, the object-oriented virtual memory, the message-passing pseudo operating system, and squeezing them all into the ludicrous Commodore 64 (the backend system also posed interesting technical problems, but its constraints were not as vicious). The second challenge was the creation and management of the Habitat world itself. It is the experiences from the latter exercise that we think will be most relevant to future cyberspace designers.
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This is why, for example, debugging even very simple communications protocols often proves surprisingly difficult
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Detailed central planning is impossible; don't even try.
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However, they have had no reason to learn to deal with large populations of simultaneous users
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Furthermore, in a system designed to deliver information or communications services, large numbers of users are simply a load problem rather than a complexity problem
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For 20,000 Avatars we needed 20,000 "houses"
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We needed wilderness areas between the towns so that everyone would not be jammed together into the same place. Most of all, we needed things for 20,000 people to do. They needed interesting places to visit -- and since they can't all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit
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and things to do in those places
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It is really not a problem if every apartment building looks pretty much like every other
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Places whose value lies in their uniqueness, or at least in their differentiation from the places around them, need to be crafted by hand
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which we let the players themselves drive the direction of the design.
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We included these because we felt that players should be able to materially effect each other in ways that went beyond simply talking, ways that required real moral choices to be made by the participants
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Death in Habitat was, of course, not like death in the real world! When an Avatar is killed, he or she is teleported back home, head in hands (literally), pockets empty, and any object in hand at the time dropped on the ground at the scene of the crime. Any possessions carried at the time are lost
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conflict is the essence of drama
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For instance, one Avatar could steal something from another Avatar simply by snatching the object out its owner's hands and running off with it.
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thus entitled to be treated as you would treat a real person) or a Pac-Man-like critter destined to die a thousand deaths or something else entirely
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is an Avatar an extension of a human being
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The result was ambiguous: 50% said that Habitat murder was a crime and shouldn't be a part of the world, while the other 50% said it was an important part of the fun
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The wilderness would be wild and dangerous while civilization would be orderly and safe
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first Habitat church, the Order of the Holy Walnut (in real life he was a Greek Orthodox priest). His canons forbid his disciples to carry weapons, steal, or participate in violence of any kind. His church became quite popular and he became a very highly respected member of the Habitat community
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Furthermore, while we had made direct theft impossible, one could still engage in indirect theft by stealing things set on the ground momentarily or otherwise left unattended
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Sheriff
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We were stumped about what powers to give him. Should he have the right to shoot anyone anywhere? Give him a more powerful gun? A magic wand to zap people off to jail? What about courts? Laws? Lawyers?
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anarchists and statists
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This division of characters and world views is an issue that will need to be addressed by future cyberspace architects
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but can instead evolve one as needed.
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You can't trust anyone.
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The first we call the "infrastructure level
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The second we call the "experiential level
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Avatars were hatched with 2000 Tokens in their bank account, and each day that they logged in the received another 100T. Avatars could acquire additional funds by engaging in business, winning contests, finding buried treasure, and so on
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They could spend their Tokens on, among other things, various items for sale in vending machines called Vendroids. There were also Pawn Machines, which would buy objects back (at a discount, of course).
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In order to make this automated economy a little more interesting, each Vendroid had its own prices for the items in it. This was so that we could have local price variation (i.e., a widget would cost a little less if you bought it at Jack's Place instead of The Emporium)
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We sent Habitat mail to the two richest, inquiring as to where they had gotten all that money overnight. Their reply was, "We got it fair and square! And we're not going to tell you how!
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This gun was not something that regular players were supposed to have. What should we do?
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The player considered that he had obtained the weapon as part of the normal course of the game and balked at this, whereupon the operator threatened to cancel the player's account and kick him off the system if he did not comply. The player gave the gun back, but was quite upset about the whole affair, as were many of his friends and associates on the system. Their world model had been painfully violated
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Operating within the participants' world model produced a very satisfactory result. On the other hand, taking what seemed like the expedient course, which involved violating the world-model, provoked upset and dismay.
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implement the system on more advanced hardware, enabling a more sophisticated display
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the line of development most interesting to us is to expand on the idea of making the development and expansion of the world itself part of the users' sphere of control
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We feel that the defining characteristic of cyberspace is the sharedness of the virtual environment, and not the display technology used to transport users into that environment
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It seems clear to us that an object-oriented world model is a key ingredient in any cyberspace implementation
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Finally, we have come to believe that the most significant challenge for cyberspace developers is to come to grips with the problems of world creation and management
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The most important of these is that managing a cyberspace world is not like managing the world inside a single-user application or even a conventional online service
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Instead, it is more like governing an actual nation
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Cyberspace architects will benefit from study of the principles of sociology and economics as much as from the principles of computer science
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• Get real.
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They are paying money for this service. They don't view what they do as inane and trivial, or they wouldn't do it
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In a real system that is going to be used by real people, it is a mistake to assume that the users will all undertake the sorts of noble and sublime activities which you created the system to enable
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Most of them will not. Cyberspace may indeed change humanity, but only if it begins with humanity as it really is.
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Howard SilvermanThis paper was presented at The First International Conference
on Cyberspace held in May 1990 at the University of Texas at Austin. It
was published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (ed.), 1991,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. -
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31 Mar 05
Jonathan PetersonA lengthy post-mortem on lessons learned building and operating Lucasfilms Habitat, a very eary (if not the first) commercial multi-user game/cyberspace environment. Still some useful lessons in the article.
interaction multi-user multi-player lucas games development tools collaboration
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beattakeshione of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment
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28 Dec 04
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30 Jul 04
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29 Apr 04
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