The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

Abstract

Habitat is a "multi-player online virtual environment", created by Lucasfilm Games, a division of LucasArts Entertainment Company, in association with Quantum Computer Services, Inc. It was arguably one of the first attempts to create a very large scale commercial multi-user virtual environment in 1985. The system we developed could support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presented its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users could communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government.
 Our experiences developing the Habitat system, and managing the virtual world that resulted, offer a number of interesting and important lessons for prospective cyberspace architects. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of these lessons. We hoped that the next generation of builders of virtual worlds can benefit from our experiences and (especially) from our mistakes.

Scaling Consensus: Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance

“…The idea is not new. Morningstar and Farmer argued as early as 1990 for developers to relinquish control, and that users "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," and recommended that "a virtual world need not be set up with a 'default' government, but can instead evolve one as needed" [8]. The potential for sophisticated, community-generated social norms and governance mechanisms is partly a designed feature of the technological architecture in which the community grows.…”

Bridging Media with the Help of Players

“…Here, players' ingenuity has led to countless unexpected dramatic and narrative creations that often defy the designers' intentions. As Morningstar and Farmer, pioneers of the graphic multiplayer world Habitat, discovered already in the first generation of graphic multiplayer worlds: 'detailed central planning is impossible' [4]. Players who engage with these worlds often adapt to new media and narrative possibilities with impressive speed and develop a mastery that allows them to tweak and re-use the available features in countless new ways.…”

Meeting in the Ether: A Brief History of Virtual Worlds as a Medium for User-Created Events

“…Imlacs or Altos were too large and expensive to leave the laboratory for lives in suburban homes, but with the arrival of affordable colourgraphics capable personal computers such as the Commodore 64, and low-speed dial-up network interfaces, the stage was set for the first graphical, social virtual world, Habitat (Morningstar 1991), created by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer working at Lucasfilm in the mid-1980s. The Habitat screen capture (Figure 3) shows users (for the first time referred to as "avatars") interacting through text chat and moving around a built environment that could change through time.…”