Origin of Avatars, MMOs, and Freemium
An interview with Chip Morningstar (and podcast hosts: Randy Farmer and Scott Moore) who created and ran the first MMOs/Virtual Worlds. This segment focuses on the emergent social phenomenon encountered the first time people used avatars with virtual currency, and artificial scarcity.
Habitat Promotional Video (1986)
The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat
— Transcript —
Randy: Welcome to episode 6 of the Social Media Clarity podcast, I’m Randy Farmer.
Marc: I’m Marc Smith.
Scott: I’m Scott Moore.
Chip: …and I’m Chip Morningstar.
Randy: This week we got together for a conversation with Chip Morningstar. Amongst many other things he was the creator of the first virtual world, Lucasfilm’s Habitat, and I was lucky enough to work with him on that project and likewise our other co-host, Scott Moore, worked with Chip Morningstar and myself on a reboot of that product under the name WorldsAway for Fujitsu in the 1990’s.
Our informal discussion with Chip lasted for over an hour. This podcast contains less than a fifth of that content. If you are interested in future episodes from that interview, please let us know by leaving a comment. Thank you.
Marc: These days we would not find it surprising to hear about our friends, our family spending many, many hours inhabiting the role or character of a different person with thousands if not, tens of thousands of other people around the world. These are the massively multi-player online role playing games, graphical virtual worlds. But there was a day where that was completely new. That day was in the mid 1980’s. With us today, we have our podcast host, Randy Farmer and his collaborator, Chip Morningstar, and the two of you created a system that initially was called Lucasfilm’s Habitat.
Chip: Lucasfilm’s Habitat’s the first title that went out with it was publicly disclosed.
Randy: It would turn out that that would only be the beta test name. It released under the name Club Caribe on the Quantum Link service. We now that as AOL. About the same time, it would be licensed for Japan’s market by Fujitsu. Eventually, Fujitsu would bring it back to the United States in 1996 under the name WorldsAway.
Marc: At the time that Lucasfilm’s Habitat was implemented, I believe that the most advanced technical platform for home computing was something called the Commodore 64 and the 64 was important because it was a measure of its memory. It wasn’t gigabytes.
Randy: No, it was 64 kilobytes. That’s thousands.
Marc: So not even megabytes.
Randy: No.
Chip: And that was not even the most substantial platform by any means, it was merely the most ubiquitous one because it was the first one that was really cheap.
Marc: So there were thousands of homes across America that suddenly had these Commodore 64’s and while it wasn’t anything like the power of, oh, let’s say a cell phone today, it was, at the time, the most graphically rich platform available.
Chip: There were certainly more sophisticated computers but they were considerably more expensive and they didn’t have the kind of mass market penetration that the Commodore had.
Marc: You implemented many of the key ingredients of what we consider to be the set of features necessary to have a massively multi-player online role playing game. What could you do on this platform?
Chip: You could connect to a shared virtual world that you shared live and in real time with thousands of other people. You could converse with them. You could move around from place to place in the world. The things you do, other people would see and the things other people did you would see. The world was filled with objects that you could interact with, manipulate, pick up, carry around from place to place, use as tools or weapons or dramatic props. You could send email to other people in the world. You had a long list of features that this part some are kind of lost to the fog of memory.
Randy: This is the first multi-player online game that featured avatars. Chip coined the term “avatar” for Lucasfilm’s Habitat. We needed a way to describe your character in the world. This was the first world to ever use avatars.
Chip: Well this was the first time we represented people in a shared environment as people. This is the first time that anybody had done multi-player games in a way that was large scale and open ended. It had been two player games or four player games but this was unbounded. There needed to be some kind of visual presentation of the people in the world. I’m not quite sure where I stumbled across the word avatar but it’s a Sanskrit word that refers to the projection of other worldly being into the world. Mythologically it talks about a god appearing in our mist in our world but from perspective of these virtual worlds we are the outside people existing on a higher plane who are projecting ourselves into this world so it seemed to fit.
Randy: I liked one more thing about it, back then machines were connected through telephone lines, literally. It would make a phone call to a local exchange that would then connect to Quantum Link that we now know as America Online at 300 baud, that’s 30 characters per second. A touch typist could type faster than data passed over the network and yet we were bringing up graphical virtual worlds. At the time, Quantum Link was stumbling for how to describe this project. They said, could you describe it in 25 words or less and how do you win. I don’t care if you are playing Grand Theft Auto with multiple people or World of Warcraft. The idea that you could try to describe it so compactly is what we were fighting against at the time.
Marc: What I found interesting about your paper that was in Benedict’s book, Cyberspace….
Randy: … Cyberspace: First Steps. It had a 1991 publish date.
Marc: And what I found fascinating was that many of the challenges that were described in the system were not technical. They were social. The computers ran perfectly fine. The network ran fine. The graphic rendering went fine. The challenges were emergent and they had to do with how people interacted with people.
Chip: Well, that’s both and not true. The technical challenges were certainly substantial and we’re pretty proud of ourselves for having met them but in a lot of ways they were conventional. Cramming ridiculous amounts functionality into a small amounts of code is sort of what game developers do. The interesting thing about the social dimensions is, first of all, they were something that we hadn’t really anticipated. I mean, we should have, but for some reason it just didn’t dawn on us this whole additional level of design and management that had to go into the thing and the other was that, as we got into it, the social dimensions ended up proving a lot more interesting to us.
Marc: Scott, maybe you can describe some of the initial social challenges that you encountered on the platform.
Scott: We need to fast forward to 1995 when I joined the Worlds Away team. I was brought in as the social manager. The big lesson was learn to adapt or you’re going to be in trouble. We had a lot of preconceived notions about how we were going to operate as the social managers. As soon as the doors opened for the beta we were running to keep up with all the things that people were doing.
Randy: Habitat is the root of not only avatars and objects in virtual worlds, it was the first place that was selling graphical virtual objects. The vending machines all sold items so the economy tokens to buy whatever you needed to play with in the world. We also had pawn machines which bought items back so that you can get some tokens at a discount.
Chip: They were intended to keep the trash from accumulating.
Randy: Chip designed it so that each machine could have an individual price list for the items so you can have localized economies. We made a mistake and had a pawn machine buying certain objects for more than their purchase value from a vending machine across town. We had made this mistake twice, once with a small item and once with a very large item. I had this report that was called the T1 which was the token supply and over the weekend it had quintupled several of the influences in the community had spent the whole weekend buying boxes and boxes of the little thing, then selling them and doing that until they had enough to buy the big thing and repeated this process all weekend generating millions of tokens in an economy that didn’t even have millions of tokens in it. This is how a technical problem becomes a social problem. We were lucky it was a beta test and those people chose to redistribute the wealth and we fixed the bug.
These stories have been around for coming up on 40 years.
Chip: And yet every one of these systems still seem to have a money bug.
Randy: Exactly. We still seeing systems with ship with “Dupe” bugs and overflow bugs and it’s amazing we’ll see them in companies as new as Zynga. Their economy will be hyper inflated because they don’t manage their chips as if they were real money even though they are real money.
Marc: Tokens weren’t the only artifacts that were exchange in these systems.
Chip: Yes, the original habitat and the immediate descendants of it including WorldsAway, the head of an avatar was a separate object. We did that as a cheap way of allowing people to personalize their avatar because we couldn’t afford a lot of pixels for artwork. There are certain heads that are rarer than others and because tokens tended to inflate even without these kinds of bugs the defacto currency of the world ended up being rare and exotic heads, simply because they were more conserved and they had distinctive identities.
Marc: The head bandits seemed to evoke a second order solution, some kinds of enforcement groups, you could go and say, I’ve been robbed and we’d provide you with some justice.
Chip: That was a habitat tale. Some people were doing things that other people thought were mean and nasty and some of them came to us and said, “We want a sheriff.” And we said, “Okay, what is the sheriff going to do?” They said, well a sheriff is going to do something about all these people doing bad things, and we said, “Well, okay, how is that all going to work?” and we put our heads together and ended up creating a sheriff’s head. It has a big hat with a big star on it and we had a voting machine, a way of conducting an election. They ran a campaign which they organized themselves and eventually we had an election and some person was elected sheriff and we gave him the sheriff’s head so now there was this person that was the sheriff and what could the sheriff do. Well, the sheriff didn’t actually have any power or authority at all but he had the blessing of the community, had the public imprimatur that said, I have been empowered by the rest of the people here to go around and tell people to stop doing bad things. It was strictly moral authority, he didn’t have any actual enforcement power at all, he just had the weight of combined sentiment of the community behind him. That turned out to be incredibly powerful. That turned out to be not invincible but it was actually far more effective than you might imagine.
Marc: The history of these system is remarkably relevant as the rest of humanity has decided to move into the descendants of these platforms so your experience at the dawn of creation is very valuable. I’d like to thank Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer and Scott Moore for joining us this episode so thanks for joining us.
Chip: It was great fun.
Marc: Thanks again Chip.
Scott: Thanks Chip.
Randy: This week instead of giving a tip, I’m going to take one from Daniel J. Lewis from Audacity To Podcast. He said if you want something from your listeners, you should ask for it often. Starting this week we’d like to ask that if you enjoy our podcast regularly please leave us feedback, rate us on iTunes, or write us reviews wherever you get your feed. That would help spread the word and we thank you.