Author Archive
June 5, 2007
Gnome Rain: BlockChat™ moves to Worlds of Warcraft
As I wrote in a recent post:
By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.
As with all worlds, this is now demonstratively true in Worlds of Warcraft, where a new text-filter on broadcast chat messages was recently installed to supposedly prevent gold farmers from spamming users about their websites.
It worked for a few days, until yesterday, The Day it Rained Gnomes.
Watch the video and duck…
I often have a conversation with online community/product managers telling them that text-filters are a symptom of deeper problems in your product and are not a solution. They usually don’t belive me – but now I have the video.
(For the comments section: How many design flaws/weaknesses are involved in the chain of events that lead to the world raining gnomes? Here’s a hint about where to start counting…)
May 19, 2007
Second Life History: The Jessie Massacre
Or: The first deployment of user-created WMDs in a 3D virtual world
As told by the perpetrator, Oracle Omega
My first impression of Second Life was formed when it was still under development, when Phillip came to visit Chip and me at our third little startup: State Software. Technically, it was pretty amazing. They’d finally created an extensible, programmable world with physics built right in. On the social side the model was that everyone would live and build on one of a few large continents. We cautioned that this would be fraught with peril. Even before the first beta testers arrived, they’d been warned that their biggest problems were going to be property encroachment, bad neighbors, and script-griefing. Alpha World had demonstrated that many of the neighborhoods would be something between garbage dumps, billboard farms, and smutty slums next to some amazingly creative and wonderful stuff. Much of the predicted chaos happened during beta, but the full force wasn’t felt until broader release, especially when anyone could join instantly and for free.
I happened to be unemployed during late alpha and early beta, and had been so intrigued by Second Life that I decided to run some experiments, pushing the limits of what how I thought future users would abuse the system, specifically property rights and scripting capabilities. As I’ve written elsewhere, regular beta testers normally don’t push the limits as much as we’d like them to because they fear losing their status as testers by being ejected.
Having co-created several of the progenitors of this type of system, I knew where to look for cracks. I had no fear of being ejected for taking the servers down. On the contrary, it was an explicit goal. Better now, during testing, than later with paying customers.
Probably the most legendary of my experiments was the Invisible Teleporting Grenade of Death. Nothing special compared to the offensive and defensive objects in Second Life today, but it caused quite a stir during beta because it was the first known deployment of a user-created Weapon of Mass Destruction in a 3D virtual world.
Note: This wasn’t the first programmable world I’d done massive damage to: Years earlier, after a certain Wizard on LambdaMOO decided to show-off and summon all the food in his world to our room for a food-fight, I was inspired to write a script that would summon all instances of any class into the room with me. I tried on it Class:Paper, and it worked perfectly , first try. It was at that moment I realized I had no way to put the paper back where it belonged! I quickly wrote a script that stuffed the paper into the pockets of their owners and reported this flaw to another Wizard. She was not happy.
During the Second Life beta test, its initial culture was starting to emerge. In my experience, worlds like this one attract early adopters of a somewhat democratic-libertarian bent – “Lets just all get along” and “Leave Real Life rules behind” often reflect the mentality of the most vocal users. But, something unusual happened this time – another virtualworld, called World War II Online, was failing and its 1940’s role-playing refugees migrated to Second Life, en masse. Since it provided for personal combat (hit points), death (teleport you home), and you could build just about anything, including weapons, it seemed like an ideal fit. Quickly they’d built up WWII cultural and military items, including Nazi uniforms, gear and propaganda, including flags and posters with Swastikas and the like. Eventually they took over the only remaining full-combat enabled simulator [patch of land], named Jessie, and made it their home.
A WWIIOL emplacement in Jessie
This ticked off many members of the existing community, who detested all of the pro-Nazi imagery. The WWII online-ers said they just wanted to be left alone to play their war games. Both sides were sniping at each other, both literally and with virtual weapons. Eventually there was a huge wall constructed separating Jessie from its neighbors. It didn’t help.
I’d built and run too many worlds and had seen this kind of thing end badly so many times that I just stayed out of it. Honestly, this was the kind of thing I’d warned about from the beginning and I just wanted to see what would happen.
Until the day I’d completed my latest experiment.
I’d been working with the object spawning directives in the scripting language. I’d also discovered that I could make an object very small (less than an inch in diameter), and very transparent (virtually invisible). It struck on me that I could make a weapon of mass destruction and do it very cheaply. It worked like this: a tiny invisible floating grenade that would explode into dozens of invisible tiny fragments flying outward spherically at maximum velocity and doing maximum damage and then immediately teleport itself to another random location in the simulator. It would be undetectable, unstoppable, and lethal: The perfect killing machine. It could only be stopped by me shouting the keyword: STOP!
Small-scale tests on my land were successful. It fired up to 100 rounds per minute. But, where could I test this at full scale? There was only one answer – Jessie – the only Sim with an active population and the fatality flag on. As a special guest beta tester I had 30 minutes early access to the servers, so I dropped six of these little gems in Jessie just before opening time, they wouldn’t have a chance to catch me. Back then, each object spawn cost $L10, so my balance indicator started fluctuating wildly as the invisible fragments spawn, flew, and eventually hit something or someone.
I flew to the simulators with the most users and tried to chat naturally, but it was difficult, knowing the chaos that was going on in Jessie when people arrived: Log in, poke around awhile then seem to randomly die, get teleported home, which is also in Jessie, wait a short moment, repeat!
After about a half hour, people around me were starting to say “Wow! Someone is slaughtering those WWII guys in Jessie!” “That place is in a panic!” “That guy’s my hero!” “Lets go see!” The grenades were working. Besides making my point about the scripting language, I’d created one of the first legendary events of the world. That was exciting.
But, only then did I realize I’d chosen sides in a fight that I didn’t really care about. I wasn’t really sure what to do at that moment, when I got an Instant Message from one of the Lindens: “Did you release an auto cannon in Jessie?” I had to be a smartass and answer: “No. I released six. I’ll go and deactivate them now.”
I flew to the edge of Jessie and shouted the keyword. My balance meter stopped jumping around and stabilized, the attack was over. It had been well over an hour since opening, and I was certain that I had the highest kill rate in Second Life history. But now I had a problem. I had no way to extract them (and I wasn’t about to enter Jessie at that moment anyway – I was certainly Kill On Sight at that point, assuming they knew the name of the bomber.
It turned out that my grenades were too small and invisible. Though they were now inert I couldn’t find them to remove them. In effect, they were a dormant virus in Jessie. So, I filed a bug report: “Unable to select small, invisible objects.” The in next day or two there was a patch to the client to “show transparency” so that it would be possible for me to see them, select them, and delete them – which I promptly did. But the legend remains.
In the end, very little was done to mitigate the design of WMDs like mine, and I was told that to “fix” the problem would put serious limits on the creativity of future users. So be it. But, given the history of the service since then, with so many sim-failures based on malicious and accidental infinite spawning scripts, I’m not so sure that ignoring this problem was the best choice. I hope it is not too late.
March 1, 2007
The Untold History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (or BlockChattm from Disney finally arrives)
In 1992, I co-founded a company with Chip Morningstar and Douglas Crockford named Electric Communities. We initially did a lot of consulting for various media companies that were looking to leverage the emerging online gaming industry. One of those companies was Disney.
Disney had formed a group to look into taking the brand online, including a full-fledged multiplayer experience as early as 1996, when the were considering a product called HercWorld, which was to leverage the upcoming movie franchise Hercules. Having built Lucasfilm’s Habitat and WorldsAway, we were clearly amongst a handful of teams that had successfully constructed social virtual worlds that’d made any real money, and Crock had media connections from his days a Paramount, so they brought us in to discuss what it would take to build a kid-safe virtual world experience.
They had hired their own expert to lead the project, a former product manager for Knowledge Adventure – a kid’s software company that’d done some 3D work as well as their own online project KA-Worlds, which was meant to link sick children in hospitals together using computers and avatars.
Disney makes no bones about how tightly they want to control and protect their brand, and rightly so. Disney means "Safe For Kids". There could be no swearing, no sex, no innuendo, and nothing that would allow one child (or adult pretending to be a child) to upset another.
I found myself unable to reconcile the idea of a virtual world, where kids would run around, play with objects, and chat with each other without someone saying or doing something that might upset another. Even in 1996, we knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I asked for a clarification: "I’m confused. What standard should we use to decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?"
The response was one I will never forget: "Disney’s standard is quite clear:
No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed."
"So much for no-harm, no-foul," Chip grumbled, quietly. This requirement lead me to some deep thinking over the coming weeks and months about a moderation design I called "The Disney Panopticon", but that’s a post for another day…
"OK. That means Chat Is Out of HercWorld, there is absolutely no way to meet your standard without exorbitantly high moderation costs," we replied.
One of their guys piped up: "Couldn’t we do some kind of sentence constructor, with a limited vocabulary of safe words?"
Before we could give it any serious thought, their own project manager interrupted, "That won’t work. We tried it for KA-Worlds."
"We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."
"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:
I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
KA-Worlds abandoned that approach. Electric Communities is right, chat is out."
That was pretty much settled, but it felt like we had collectively gutted the project. After all, if the kids can’t chat, how could they coordinate? It’d end up being more like a world where you could see other players playing but you couldn’t really work with them much. [Side note: Sadly, a lot of MMORPG play is like this anyway, see Playing Alone Together.]
As I starting daydreaming about how to get chat back into this project, we moved on to what activities the kids might do in the now-chat-free HercWorld. It was standard fare: Collect stuff, ride stuff, shoot at stuff, build stuff… Oops, what was that last thing again?
"…kids can push around Roman columns and blocks to solve puzzles, make custom shapes, and buildings.", one of the designers said.
I couldn’t resist, "Umm. Doesn’t that violate the Disney standard? In this chat-free world, people will push the stones around until they spell Hi! or F-U-C-K or their phone number or whatever. You’ve just invented Block-Chattm. If you can put down objects, you’ve got chat. We learned this in Habitat and WorldsAway, where people would turn 100 Afro-Heads into a waterbed." We all laughed, but it was that kind of awkward laugh that you know means that we’re all probably just wasting our time.
HercWorld never happened.
Once again, into the breech
Electric Communities moved on, renamed itself Communities.com (which has nothing in common with the current company/site using that name and url.) and did some wonderful design work on a giant multimedia 3D kid’s world for Cartoon Network, which ended up being much too ambitious to fund, but I mention it because the project was headed by Brian Bowman. Brian eventually left Atlanta for Disney, where he was in charge of the online experience for Zoog Disney, a pre-teen programming block. Brian remembered his work with us and asked us to help build a world for the Zoog audience. Nothing so extravagant this time, just something simple, like The Palace (which, by then had been acquired by Communities.com.), a no-download, in-browser, 2D graphical chat with some programmed object capabilities.
"The Disney Standard" (now a legend amongst our employees) still held. No harassment, detectable or not, and no heavy moderation overhead.
Brian had an idea though: Fully pre-constructed sentences – dozens of them, easy to access. Specialize them for the activities available in the world. Vaz Douglas, our project manager working with Zoog, liked to call this feature "Chatless Chat." So, we built and launched it for them. Disney was still very tentative about the genre, so the only ran it for about six months; I doubt it was ever very popular.
Third time’s a charm
But the concept resurfaced at Disney a few years later [2002] in the form of SpeedChat in ToonTown. It was refined – you select a subject and then from a submenu of sentences, each automatically customized to the correct context. Selecting "I need to find …", would magically insert the names of the items you have quests for. For all walk-up users, all interactions would be via SpeedChat.
They added a method to allow direct chat between users that involves the exchange of secret codes that are generated for each user (with parental permission). The idea is that kids would print them out and give them to each other on the playground. This was a great way for Disney to end-run the standard – since Speed Chat was an effective method of preventing the exchange of these codes, and theoretically the codes had to be given "in-person", making the recipient not-a-stranger. Sure, some folks post them
on message boards, but presumably those are folks who 1) are adults, or 2) know each other, right? In any case, as long as no one could pass secret codes within Toontown itself, Disney feels safe.
The Ghost of BlockChattm past
Soon after ToonTown opened its doors, they added Toon Estates – a feature that gives you a house with furniture, initially just a bed, gumball machine, chair, and armoire. Then they added the ability to buy more furniture of all shapes and sizes from catalogs, and then you could invite people to visit your house to see how you have arranged all your cool stuff.
Sure enough, chatters figured out a few simple protocols to pass their secret code, several variants are of this general form:
User A:"Please be my friend."
User A:"Come to my house?"
User B:"Okay."
A:[Move the picture frames on your wall, or move your furniture on the floor to make the number 4.]
A:"Okay"
B:[Writes down 4 on a piece of paper and says] "Okay."
A:[Move objects to make the next letter/number in the code] "Okay"
B:[Writes…] "Okay"
A:[Remove objects to represent a "space" in the code] "Okay"
[Repeat steps as needed, until…]
A:"Okay"
B:[Enters secret code into Toontown software.]
B:"There, that worked. Hi! I’m Jim 15/M/CA, what’s your A/S/L?"
It seems that many of The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat still ring true.
I’ll consider this as The SpeedChat Corollary:
By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.
P.S: Brian tells me that Cartoon Network is actually resuming the project, more than ten years later; "… now that is being ahead of your time."
[Thanks to the legendary Robin Hood of Neopets for telling me about this Secret Code exchange prototcol.]
[Yes, the BlockChattm brand is a joke.]
January 2, 2007
Archive Repost: Second Life in Fall 2003
[The MUD-DEV archives have been offline for several years and I know some folks have linked to the following post (and now have dead links). Since I re-tell parts of this story often, I thought I’d archive it here for posterity. There is no special meaning to me re-posting it now.]
From : “F. Randall Farmer”
To : “Discussion of MUD system design, development,and implementation”
Subject : RE: [MUD-Dev] The State of Play: On the Second Life Tax Revolt
Date : Tue, 23 Sep 2003 23:12:33 -0700
Monday, September 22, 2003 8:16 AM, J C Lawrence said:
> The State of Play: On the Second Life Tax Revolt Posted by James
> Grimmelmann on Sunday, September 21 @ 19:11:48 EDT Governance
I couldn’t let this one go without comment:
JC quotes a rather lengthy article attempting to tie a “tax revolt” in Second Life to an emergent democracy. As a long-time beta tester of Second Life (and a a User Experience/UI design contractor a few months back), I’d have to say that it is all much ado about nothing. The ‘protest’ was neither widespread, nor was it as ‘intense’ as as it could have been (see below). Virtual Press photos had to be re-enacted for the staff-written newsletter and the vast bulk of users didn’t know it had happened until he wrote about it, days later.
Specifically, Grimmelmann said:
> Other than quitting the game entirely (the threat which lurks
> behind all such protests), a street party is just about the only
> action you can take that will even come to the attention of the
> authorities.
This is an understatement of some scale for all systems, but especially Second Life.
A protest party is pretty much the _easiest_ action you can take in SL.
I personally (along with many others) have generated significant attention and action from ‘the authorities’ (and fellow citizens) using the built-in scripting, object creation mechanisms, and persuasive reasoning on the game Forums.
During beta, I built an invisible teleporting auto-cannon that fired 100 invisible rounds per minute and unleashed it in an area of WWII Online folks who had been at ‘war’ with my clan. It killed hundreds for about an hour before I was asked by the ‘authorities’ to remove it. Changes were made so that invisible objects can be seen in authoring mode.
After release, I created a world-touring, talking airship ALA Blade-Runner. Logs indicate that thousands of people had seen and interacted with over a two month period. It became well known, and the subject of some debate. This airship (along with various user-run air taxi services) often became ‘stuck’ over people’s land because of a mis-tuned property feature. One good rant posted on
their forums stating a rational case and citing Lawrence Lessig citing the Supreme Court’s decision in US V. CAUSBY and the problem was fixed in the next build. [See full post for excerpted discussion thread.]
And I’m not even close the most skilled or prolific scripters/artists/politicos on that system. Though my personal reputation may have helped convince the authorities in the case of the airship right-of-way discussion, that serves to reinforce my point: Well considered and executed individual action often facilitates change more efficiently than any mob-party.
Honestly, the Tea-Party in Second-Life had little in common with the historic event: Destroying ships and tea did real financial harm to the King of England (and loyalist businesses). The tea crates in the SL protest were bought and paid for by the protesters, who were taxed for them anyway. On the other hand, those few who tore down the structures that they knew Linden Labs liked to visit during their press demos (thus removing value from the system) were closer to those great American terrorists of old. :-) They were few and far between.
Most of the tax protesters aren’t all that serious. They aren’t en-mass taking the actions that would cause a change, because it isn’t that important to them. It is a street-party because they’ll keep playing even if the tax structure doesn’t ever change.
So, asserting that a real-time ‘street-party’ protest within a virtual world is the most effective form of facilitating change we can hope-for/expect is a supposition that I think deserves serious challenge. Users can (and will) do so much more.
The so-called Second Life Tax Revolt is a bad example of ’emergent governance’ for the reasons stated above: Taxes don’t matter enough for the users to do anything significant, even though they have the power and the skills.
Randy [September 23, 2003]
December 19, 2006
Raph Koster Soars Without a Net: Areae.net
Raph Koster has his first startup: Areae.
Venture Capitalist (and Areae funding partner) Susan Wu has a great post that says many of the things about Areae that I wanted to, so rather than repeat them, I’ll just add a few things of my own.
Raph’s design pedigree is impeccable, but this is his first startup – and that introduces a whole new set of challenges. Dead (and dying) virtual world businesses abound. Worlds/Games with excellent design and technical execution can fail for lack of business focus, non-existent market research, decent marketing, competent management, financial prestidigitation, faulty timing, audience mismanagement, and more. It is a much larger mountain to climb, especially for the first time.
Yes, Raph will have more creative control than ever and no bureaucracy to slow him down. Huzzah! But, in exchange, he won’t have the same resources that he’s used to at his command. That’s why he’s got his board of directors and his advisors. I’m proud to be a member of that team. Though we are a much thinner safety net than, say, SOE, we do represent a broad set of industry experience. Some say I’m old and cranky and perhaps that is why Raph asked Richard and I to help: we grizzled veterans know where mayny dragons there be lurking in the wylds.
Thus girded
we head off
to discover
new worlds
together
once again.
Dusting off my questing clothes,
Randy
November 1, 2006
The essential paradigm of cyberspace
TerraNova discusses “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything”.
Again. :-)
Chip and I will comment there for awhile.
October 13, 2006
Playing Catch Up: Habitat's Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer
Gamasutra has a wonderful article about the history of Chip and I working together (with many others) pioneering many modern social software products and features, including some great reminisces of The Lessons…:
“Today’s Playing Catch-Up, a weekly column that dares to speak to notable video game industry figures about their celebrated pasts and promising futures, speaks to the creators of Lucasfilm Games’ 1986 groundbreaking online Commodore 64 game/virtual world Habitat, Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar.” more
It’s a mini-history of on branch evolution of social software from the time before the web and and insight into how we have worked together for more than two decades across many different companies.
September 20, 2006
Social Computing: From Message Boards to Blogs & Beyond
Back on Valentine’s day I was honored to be on a panel on the history of social computing that I was able to help structure. My co-panelists were Usenet guru Erik Fair, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott, together with our moderator Wall Street Journal columnist Kara Swisher.
Since I don’t come off as clumsy as usual on camera, I’ve embedded the video. It is and hour and a half long, so you might want to download it from the Computer History Museum directly instead…
I thought we covered some good ground getting some of the history on record, but think I’d like to try this again with a tighter focus on lessons learned. Perhaps, next time, I’ll moderate. :-)
August 15, 2006
Quiz: Can You Read This?
For a clear image of the shirt design, see Can you read my new T-Shirt? (Improved! Now with Interactive Content™), another entry in the Randy’s T-Shirts series.
August 1, 2006
Armed and Dangerous (A Randy's T-Shirts entry)
How could I know that singing Man of Constant Sorrow in public could be considered a terrorist weapon?
Read more of this story on my Yahoo 360° blog, posted as Armed and Dangerous, a part of the Randy’s T-Shirts series.
Randy