The humanity of LucasArts' virtual world forerunner Habitat
As if I needed another excuse to get my hands on Rogue Leaders, the visual history book on the golden age of Lucasarts I mentioned in December, Gamasutra has run a great excerpt not on any of the usual Monkey Island or Grim Fandango suspects, but rather Habitat, the late-80s Commodore 64 virtual world forerunner which ultimately failed for its beta trial's overwhelming success.
The article explains of its creation:
Development began in 1985 and sketched out a virtual world where each player had an in-game "avatar" -- a word defining a player's online representation (and still used today). These characters could interact with other players, connected in a massive online world composed of 20,000 "regions" -- essentially individual screens connected to as many as four additional regions...Despite the apparent advantage of not having to program artificial intelligence for in-game characters, given that all the players were real people, creating rules for player interactions required the developers to broach subjects never before considered in game design.
Remarked Chip Morningstar in a long treatise on Habitat's creative process: "A special circle of living Hell awaits the implementers of systems involving that most important category of autonomous computational agents: groups of interacting human beings."
Book Extract: 'Rogue Leaders' On Lucasfilm Games' Habitat [Gamasutra]
Previously:
Chronicle holding LucasArts book signing - Offworld
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zachary
#1 – 3:24 PM January 21, 2009
Ah, Habitat. Great to read about. I think it is an important product to highlight as it is the great great grandparent to Second Life, WoW, and all other graphical multi-user online games.
But it was much more than a game. From a sociological and anthropological standpoint you could also view the lifespan of Habitat from its beta testing days until the servers were turned off as the rise and fall of a civilization. Not only were the software engineers and in-world moderators covering new ground that hadn't been explored, but so too were Habitat's human inhabitants.
One of the other amazing things about Habitat was the academic theory and research that went into building and maintaining the virtual world. They were basically building an entire civilization from scratch in an entirely unexplored medium of existence, and they had many problems to solve. Problems of human-human interaction, human-environment interactions, economic problems, communication problems, "crime" problems, problems surrounding the occupation of space and time, and so on.
Many of these problems still plague persistent online worlds today, such as the effect on the "fun" factor of rampant inflation due to unbalanced money creation. Or, what do you do when players exploit a hack to clone things that should be unique? And so on. There was a saying from the developers and caretakers of the game, "Social solutions for social problems. Technical solutions for technical problems."
One of the other incredible tidbits to pass along about this whole Habitat thing is that the people who developed Habitat and later Club Caribe on the C64 via the QLink online service eventually went on to create another graphical virtual world called WorldsAway on CompuServe.
Even more amazing: WorldsAway is still online to this very day, roughly 14 years running. It can be found at vzones.com The underlying framework has been extended by never completely revamped, so the original graphical style (and many of the original items and locations and even human inhabitants) STILL remain in the virtual world.
This almost certainly makes WorldsAway/VZones the single longest running persistent online graphical virtual world / "game" ever... and it also means that the ghosts and influences of Habitat have carried forward with impressive continuity since 1986.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Anonymous Anonymous
#2 – 11:58 PM January 21, 2009
I preordered the book some moths ago and when finally got it was totally blown away: I completely love it. It´s a pity to see such an innovative company creating now Star Wars game after Star Wars game :(
merreborn
#3 – 9:53 AM January 22, 2009
Randy Farmer, one of the two lead developers of Habitat, blogs about virtual-worlds related stuff over at http://habitat.thefarmers.org/
He and Bryce Glass are also working on an O'Reilly title, "Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems". They're publishing draft chapters for public discussion and revision on a regular basis at http://buildingreputation.com/