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One of the best things you'll ever read

Chip Morningstar is an author, developer, programmer and designer of software systems, mainly for online entertainment and communication.

Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right.

-- Donald Norman

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything by Chip Morningstar.

How to deconstruct almost anything

Reminded me of Chip Morningstar... http://www.fudco.com/chip/deco...

Going only on your description, I'd say Habitat for sure.

Nice photos! I like how those old magazines used direct camera shots of televisions. There was no such thing as a "screen dump" back then. Here's me in 1989: http://www.qlinklives.org/qlink-old/me1989.jpg * And here's the 1985-Commodore 64 version of "Miis" - http://www.fudco.com/chip/habitat.gif - I don't know what this is but it looks cool - http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/1991/c64_11.jpg

Those were the good old days, when computing was an adventure into unknown territories & unrealized possibilities. Nowadays it's more like a boring appliance (IMHO).

*

* (just joking; I looked more like Weesley Crusher on TNG - just a teenager.)

sorry to reply to myself. I found that JFK thing I was thinking of. linky

Here's the source for the parent's anecdote:

http://www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000058.html

The guys who write the Habitat Chronicles blog have been in the graphical multi-user online service game for a long time. If you're in to MMO design, and haven't already read it, The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat paper is a good starting point.

It's amazing how many things they point out in that paper (which is now 17 years old), that MMO designers *still* screw up to this day.

Here's the source for the parent's anecdote:

http://www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000058.html

The guys who write the Habitat Chronicles blog have been in the graphical multi-user online service game for a long time. If you're in to MMO design, and haven't already read it, The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat paper is a good starting point.

It's amazing how many things they point out in that paper (which is now 17 years old), that MMO designers *still* screw up to this day.

Found the article -- http://www.fudco.com/habitat/archives/000058.html Very interesting.

Well, what you say might all be fine and dandy, but at the heart of this issue there is no binary "yes-no" dichotomy.

Meaning that it is perfectly possible for Mr. Cremo to be a nutjob, *and* for a not-so-small percentage of established science being junk.

Being a professional scientist myself, I can unfortunately testify to the latter being far more probable than most people outside academia would hope.

An uncomfortably large number of "researchers" and "professors" in academia are basically subpar scientists, without much of a vision where the field they are allegedly proficient in is heading.

For people like that, one easy way to deflect questions about their own performance is to hamper the work of others. This is not made any better by the prevalent systems of academic self-assessment, which penalise anyone who openly admits that he or she was wrong, and that it is someone else's idea which is, in fact, brilliant.

Interestingly, this is even true for the engineering sciences where I happen to work - although the ratio of meaningful scientific output vs. effort invested is even lower in many other areas (such as the social sciences), which have less recourse to objective analysis of the results which are generated.

Chip Morningstar once wrote a brilliant essay about the mechanisms behind the decay of literary criticism as a science - read that for some really nice observations on the inner workings of academia in general.

That having been said, the theories of Mr. Cremo still do not sound particularly credible, even if one takes this "inherent bias against anything new" within academia into account. And this has nothing to do with him being a follower of a non-Western, non-standard religion.

Logic and common sense (as well as the requirement to base any conclusions on independently verifiable facts) should also apply to someone follwing ancient Vedic teachings, one would hope...

A.

The best way to deal with something like this is to pretend that it is real (in game of course) and deal with it the way that the game world would. How about bounty hunting? How about military/mafia recruiting players to hunt him down? Keep it a game. If people fall for a scam in a game, get back at him in the game. Don't suspend his account. That's just lame. I'm sure that not many people would continue to risk their characters' well being and those that do have it coming.

Agreed. Here's an account of an early MMORPG (of a sort) where both strategies were tried. The "in-game" solution was much better :

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat

Sounds simple, but it's really very hard to come up with a workable system for players to create *all* content, and have them be rewarded for it, in a way that's not vulnerable to abuse or technical issues. Second Life's the best we've seen, but even there it's possible for one player to bring down an entire server.

You understate the situation as well. Non-trivial player-made content would require a lot more than a basic MMORPG framework to make workable (it'd require a user-visible scripting language), you'd still have to front the sizable server, storage and bandwidth costs, and you'd have to hire people to teach people how to use the scripting language and create good software, and also kill damaging user-spawned processes (imagine sysadmining a system with thousands of simultaneous users).

Yet, ultimately, player-created content is the only MMORPGs can evolve. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar learned that lesson way back in Habitat (http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html):

The first goal-directed event planned for Habitat was a rather involved treasure hunt called the "D'nalsi Island Adventure". It took us hours to design, weeks to build (including a 100-region island), and days to coordinate the actors involved. It was designed much like the puzzles in an adventure game. We thought it would occupy our players for days. In fact, the puzzle was solved in about 8 hours by a person who had figured out the critical clue in the first 15 minutes. Many of the players hadn't even had a chance to get into the game. The result was that one person had had a wonderful experience, dozens of others were left bewildered, and a huge investment in design and setup time had been consumed in an eyeblink. We expected that there would be a wide range of "adventuring" skills in the Habitat audience. What wasn't so obvious until afterward was that this meant that most people didn't have a very good time, if for no other reason than that they never really got to participate. It would clearly be foolish and impractical for us to do things like this on a regular basis.

A little further:

Propelled by these experiences, we shifted into a style of operations in which we let the players themselves drive the direction of the design. This proved far more effective. Instead of trying to push the community in the direction we thought it should go, an exercise rather like herding mice, we tried to observe what people were doing and aid them in it. We became facilitators as much as designers and implementors. This often meant adding new features and new regions to the system at a frantic pace, but almost all of what we added was used and appreciated, since it was well matched to people's needs and desires. As the experts on how the system worked, we could often suggest new activities for people to try or ways of doing things that people might not have thought of. In this way we were able to have considerable influence on the system's development in spite of the fact that we didn't really hold the steering wheel -- more influence, in fact, than we had had when we were operating under the delusion that we controlled everything.

That strikes me as a lot more interesting, in the long run, than World of Warcraft, despite its strengths. Even computer-generated content, which drives most MMORPGs these days, has the disadvantage in that it tends to stop being interesting after a short period. (I DON'T think it's necessarily bad, but developers will have to loosen their stranglehold on game design and invent something almost Roguelike in nature, I believe, to make it work best.)

A data point on ELO cheating for you: Yahoo! Games uses ELO rankings for several their two-player games. Before recent abuse mitigation changes, some people used robot to accumulate scores in excess of 6,000,000 points. The abuse-the-ranking game had become a totally seperate competition.

For now, Yahoo! has capped the ELO scores at 3,000 (I think.) This removed most of the cheating incentive.

There's only so many Star Wars games you can make.

Would you care to get me a hard number so we can begin the countdown? (KOTOR notwithstanding.)

Sure: ONE.

The original quote is obviously spoken by someone utterly fed up with making movie property games. Lucasfilm used to be known for making some absolutely brilliant things; not only did they make what are regarded by many to be the best graphical adventures, but it was also in their halls where was created what may very well have been the first true graphical virtual world.

To see them reduced to the endless milking of a pair of movie licenses, no matter how culturally significant they may be, is saddening.

Actually, they started building Habitat in 1985, and the beta test started in 1986 wrapping up in 1987. I misremembered the dates: http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

Air Warrior began its testing in 1986 as well and was released in 1987. That puts them in about the same time frame. There is an excellent timeline in http://www.gatecentral.com/shared_docs/Timeline1.h tml

The problem is that Air Warrior could only have 41 planes in each instance of the game. (http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n2/kesmaiwar rior.html) Multiplayer? Yes. Wicked cool? Absolutely. Ahead of its time? Without a doubt. Massively multiplayer? No.

Habitat was massively multiplayer at a time where other games were figuring out how to be online at all.

Correction; here's a better copy of that paper without all the words run together.

I was actually in 7th grade in 1986, not 6th, but who's counting? :)

So I read this and I'm thinking "1986? Wtf, there's no way there was anything like that in 1986." ...I guess we weren't in 6th grade at the same time.

Habitat. This paper, released in 1990, has a screenshot (c) 1986. Here's the designer's resume... it gets five or six pages in Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community. Neal Stephenson credits it in the Snow Crash author's notes, possibly because it's the first use of the word 'avatar' in an online context.

The Lessons of LucasFilm's Habitat (from the same site) is also a really good read, both in terms of origins and in terms of users/administration; reselling dolls and crystal balls is enlightening, as is the bit about DEATH and THE SHADOW. It's a pity the "screenshots" are faked (as far as I know, the only real screenshots surviving from Habitat's development are photos of monitor screens).

The next step, of course, is to endlessly nag them to release the source code. ;)

The paper that this article is linking to was actually written in June 1993, as the version on the author's own site shows.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting paper, because the author went to extraordinary efforts to make sense of the literary criticism, instead of just shallowly dismissing it all as jargon.

It turned out that in two Vendroids across town from each other were two items for sale whose prices we had inadvertently set lower than what a Pawn Machine would buy them back for: Dolls (for sale at 75T, hock for 100T) and Crystal Balls (for sale at 18,000T, hock at 30,000T!). Naturally, a couple of people discovered this. ... The final result was at least three Avatars with hundreds of thousands of Tokens each. We only discovered this the next morning when our daily database status report said that the money supply had quintupled overnight.

Such a bug in Project Entropia could bankrupt the company.