Posts filed under "History"
August 10, 2008
On Language – Avatar – NYTimes.com
Lucasfilm's Habitat Promotional Video
With the coverage in the NYT – I thought people might like to see what the original avatars looked like – here’s a promotional video from 1986:
Funny what has, and has not, changed in over 20 years.
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.
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]
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.
June 30, 2006
Things You Find While Cleaning Your Office
I was going through a bunch of old papers trying to find some old crap I could throw away to make room for all the new crap I keep accumulating, and I came across a document I had written for Xanadu back in 1984. This was a tome documenting the various Xanadu data structures. It was written as part of a deal we were doing to try to get some funding from the System Development Foundation. This was back in the day when we were still stupid about intellectual property and regarded all our secret knowledge as highly proprietary magic to be guarded jealously.
Our lawyer wrote a paragraph for the cover, indicating to potential readers the proprietary nature of what they were about see and reminding them of the non-disclosure agreement that they were bound by:
This document describes data structures, designs and concepts which are the proprietary intellectual property of Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. The contents of this document are not for distribution or release in whole or in part to any other party without the express permission of Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. All portions of this document are to be considered trade secrets of Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. including the fact that some previously published data structures may fall into the classification of “enfilades”.
All pretty standard stuff (except possibly for the last sentence, which I’ll admit is a bit weird). However, being the snide young whippersnappers that we were at the time, we felt that though this covered the legal bases it didn’t quite communicate the significance of the message we were trying to convey. So I added the following beneath it:
WARNING! He who transgresses against the propriety of the Information contained herein shall be Cursed! Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe. They shall be afflicted unto the Tenth Generation with Lawyers. Their Corporate Bodies shall be Broken and cast into the Pit. Their Corporate Veil shall be pierced, and Liability shall attach to the Malefactors in personem. They shall suffer Ulcers and Migraines and Agonies Unimagined. Yea, Verily, for such shall come to pass against all who would Dare to Test the Powers of Xanadu unto their Doom.
Just thought it would be good to get that on the record before I lost the piece of paper again.
Charlie Smith, the head of the System Development Foundation, did not object to this. However, Jeff Ullman, one of his technical reviewers (and chairman of the Stanford Computer Science Department at the time), was entirely put off. He said, “I’m not going to read this. It’s got a curse on it!”
May 7, 2006
Deja Vu – The 3D Web
I just got back from attending the bulk of the Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web conference which was an attempt to bring the minds of various disciplines together to figure out how the Metaverse (3D Web) will come about over the next ten years. Since my online community development experience stretches back three decades and includes the creation of a half dozen avatar-world platforms and dozens of virtual worlds, they thought I might have something to contribute. I don’t know if they expected that I would join such notables as Raph Koster, Daniel James, Ethan Zuckerman in forming a sort of Skeptics Posse which spent a lot of energy trying to help direct some of the inexperienced techno-optimism into more useful/helpful channels. This rant is a continuation of that process.
Turned out that I was the only one attending that was a part of the last 3D Web techno-idealist wave (and colossal marketing mistake): VRML. And a lot of what I heard reminded me the writings, creations and speeches created 10 years ago by the the most influential people in VRML. The hype back then about the imminent “3D Web” was distracting a lot of companies, people, and money with promises of a much more accessible Internet through so-called natural metaphors and intuitive geographic (and stereographic) displays. At the time, Chip Morningstar, Doug Crockford a I wrote several articles and papers and made speeches critical of the Portable Avatars and 3D Is Always Better memes. More recently, this blog contains postings digging into the social, user-interface, and commercial challenges for multi-user 3D experiences.
When VRML 3.0 proposed a standard for a fundamentally broken distributed object computation model (tying behavior to polygons), we’d had enough and prepared a paper in response: Living Worlds Considered Harmful. About the time we finished it, VRML collapsed under its own weight, so we didn’t publish it – thinking, “Why whip the 3D Web dead horse?” Well, the Metaverse Roadmap conference taught my why you should always publish: You never know if that dead horse will rise again as some sort of zombie or phoenix. So, as of today, we’ve published the paper above for the next wave of application developers to consider. It’s never too late to learn from your elders. :-)
Below I am republishing my Wired rant from January 1996, which seems to be just as relevant today:
Now in 3-D!
3-D isn’t an interface paradigm. 3-D isn’t a world model. 3-D isn’t the missing ingredient. 3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue.
Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it’s going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.
Don’t get me wrong; there are great applications for 3D. That’s not the point.
The point is that idealistic assumptions and techno-optimism are no substitute for understanding what people actually want and do when they interact with each other, whether via computers or in the physical world.
Let’s not repeat the path VRML took – that’d be a double waste and I won’t do it. Let’s figure out the problem first, and then look to see if a global-shared-3d-standard-UI-identity-object-system is the solution. So far, I haven’t found a single one.
February 22, 2006
Three Generations of Habitat Oracles
Today, there were three “Generations” of Habitat Chief Oracle’s in the same place at the same time. An “Oracle” was the term and title we used for in-world customer service representative. In MMOPGs, they’re often called Game-Masters. In the Habitats, they played a double role as mystical beings, endowed with power.
I was “The Oracle” and was embodied as a fountain in the public square in the original Lucasfilm’s Habitat from 1986-1988 and am pictured on the right.
Oracle Layza was Tomoko Kojima for Fujitsu Habitat I & II is Japan from 1990-2000 or so and is pictured in the center.
Oracle Vaserius (Jeff Douglas) worked in WorldsAway from 1994-1997 and is on the left.
You know what’s interesting? We all work for Yahoo! now.
November 21, 2005
A couple of 10 year-olds…
WorldsAway’s Dreamscape also recently celebrated 10 years of avatar community.
Of course, it all started with Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Club Caribe almost 20 years ago…
Of course, it all started with Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Club Caribe almost 20 years ago…