How Gamers Made us More Social

 

[The first avatars as they appeared in 1985, thanks to Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar]

[These are research notes for my book-in-progress: Pioneers of Social Media]

Many of us often overlook the role that games have played in creating social media. They provided much of the technology that we use today, not to mention a certain attitude. Of greatest importance, is that it was on games that people started socializing with each other in large numbers, online and in public. It was in games that people started to self-organize to get complex jobs accomplished.

We had people meeting and sharing and talking and performing tasks several years before we even had the Worldwide Web.

Randy Farmer [l] and Chip Morningstar [r] seem to have been both the creative and technical forces behind much of the game innovations that we’ve absorbed into social media. They gave us avatars and they created what we awkwardly call -”massively multiuser online role-playing games,” such as World of Warcraft.

On first look, this may not seem to have much to do with today’s online enterprise communities built and nurtured by companies like IBM, SAP and Intuit, where millions of customers and partners share billions of bits of insight of information in any given month, but in fact there is a very direct connection.

Bill Johnston, Head of Global Community at Dell Computer, who pioneered enterprise communities during his earlier tenure at Autodesk said Farmer and Morningstar’s early work was “key in creating the foundation that enterprise communities were later built on.”

“The avatar, nascent identity, reputation and incentive systems the used were extended into key components of what we now know as the major community platforms that many companies use (Jive, Telligent, Lithium). ”

The story starts in 1982, George Lucas, uber-producer of  Star Wars and Indiana Jones wanted to diversify into entertainment that went beyond films. He started what is now called LucasArts, to produce computer games, that were then played on floppy disks, that you inserted into your PC. Lucas’s personal brand dictated that people would see and experience entertainment that went beyond anything that had preceded it.

Into that environment, Chip Morningstar started working with F. Randall Farmer. Chip was the senior player and Randy sort of barged his way in. The product of their first collaboration was a watershed game called Habitat. Habitat introduced the first online avatars and the first online multiuser collaborations. It etched the beginning of a trail that millions of people have followed.

Here’s their version of what happened according to my notes for Pioneers of Social Media Chapter 3: Starting Conversations.

 

How, when and why did the two of you first team up?

 

Randy: Randy: I’d pestered Lucasfilm Games [LucasArt] to work for several months. Who wouldn’t want to work for the guy making the Star Wars movies? I eventually got a contract to do the Apple II port of Koronis Rift – a bit of grunt work, but it got me in the door.

Chip:  I wrote the whole story in a blog post on HabitatChronicles.com

“… so I went and talked to this guy. I didn’t have a lot of time
to interview people, but this guy had done a really nice job on [a game] port, and done it pretty fast. And he was totally excited about the project, he’d been thinking about this sort of thing for years, it’s just the kind of thing he always wanted to work on. OK, snap judgment: ‘you’re hired.’”

Randy: Then Chip walks up with the ultimate role-playing game ever – real people playing together online in real time. I loved computers, networks, message boards, and Dungeons and Dragons. [It was] the perfect job for me.

Turns out Habitat was: 1) impossible–but we did it anyway; and 2) to be the foundation for the remainder of my career. We published papers, helped kickoff virtual worlds in Japan, and it all spawned multiple startups and eventually an industry.

Where did you get the concept for the first online avatar? What were the development challenges? I first saw the concept for avatars in a book called Snow Crash. Did this book influence you?

Randy: Actually, Snow Crash came out in 1992, six years after Habitat and the first avatars were first shown publicly.

Chip and I both loved the book and we contacted it’s author Neal Stephenson to tell him about the service. He responded by adding a paragraph to his acknowledgments about us (and Habitat) in the 3rd printing.

We documented our challenges first in a paper “Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat” which first appeared in Cyberspace: First Steps, from MIT Press in 1990. It has been cited in over 100 books, and is required reading in college courses around the world.

Chip gets the credit for being the first to tie the Sanskrit term “avatar” to your real-time presence in an online world.[It means, "the descent of a deity."]

Chip: Neal and I have compared notes and it appears that our respective derivations of “avatar” were truly independent of each other, though our thought processes to arrive at the term were eerily similar.

 

These days, most people think of avatars as they are used at Linden Labs and from the recent 3D scifi movie. What was your vision for avatar technology? How do you feel about how it has turned out? What is your vision for the future of avatars in social technologies?

Randy: Originally, I was thinking much more along the lines which are typified today by World of Warcraft – multiplayer games – and that part came true.

We continued to work in the area of user-created virtual worlds (like Second Life – where I had a brief contract to help with UI design.) The business model of allowing everyone and anyone to build their own sub-world has never turned out to be particularly profitable.

I wrote about the problem back in 2004: “But where are the consumers? Where are the folks who will pay to participate in all this great (and not-so-great) user-produced content? We built it, why aren’t they coming?”

Clearly avatars are here to stay, and new controller technology, like the XBox Kinect are blurring the line between player and avatar even further.

Chip: One recurring issue that a lot of these worlds that emphasize user-created content have is that they tend to be much more interesting to their developers and content creators than they are to their users.  The engineering
challenges are quite intoxicating and many folk of a visionary turn of mind tend to be quite drawn to the vast, open-ended space of possibilities.

However, most ordinary users tend to be content consumers rather than content producers.

 

People often point to forums and Habitat as the building blocks to today’s online communities. Do you agree or disagree?

Randy: There are so many technologies that paved the way for today’s online communities. Certainly forums and real-time gaming worlds (with and without avatars) are pillars, but so are chat, groups, and modern social networks. I don’t think anyone saw the social-gaming hybrid typified by Zynga – where the real-time co-playing was stripped out of avatar games like Farmville, and robots would substitute for your real-life friends.

Your blog covers both massive multiplayer online games and online communities. In most business people’s minds, games and their communities have little in common. Can you walk me through the similarities and why you stitch them together?

Randy: Most people lump the stuff we cover at HabitatChronicles.com–
virtual worlds, avatars, identity, security, and even reputation systems under “social media” or “social computing.”

But what makes us different from the other pundits is that we continue to build these systems. Chip still codes massively scaling multiplayer servers – by some measures, at Fudcorp.com we’re on the ninth spiritual generation of the original Habitat server. I still do virtual object client/server behavioral protocol design and implementation.

 

Randy, as an aside, during your Yahoo tenure, you spearheaded the Flickr acquisition. What was your vision then and can you comment on why it seems to have fizzled so terribly under the new management.

Randy: I distinctly remember meeting with the executives several times about why the acquisition was a good idea. Besides a trendy photo-sharing site with revenue and great tech, they had an awesome team – at this size acquisition you’re always buying the team.

The internal sales job –both to Yahoo! and to Flickr– was that the service and team would “Flickrize Yahoo!” – bringing fresh social-media savvy blood into the product teams just as people like myself seemed to be making serious innovation inroads there.

Check out the Yahoo! 360 patent portfolio, you’ll find us inventing a lot of the features that are now standard in social-networks today.

But, the Flickr social infection was almost completely rejected by the stronger antibodies of Yahoo!’s large-company mentality – embodied in the leaders of each property-silo.

The Flickr team members eventually responded by literally isolating themselves in a San Francisco office, away from the Sunnyvale headquarters.

 

Randy, you recently co-authored a new book, “Building Web Reputation Systems.” Can you briefly explain how social site and participants need to understand web reputation? What is the value? What can go wrong?

Randy: Bryce Glass and I wrote the book as a primer – a way of describing reputation systems – so that application designers can avoid many of the pitfalls discovered by previous pioneers.

For more than thirty years, I’ve been building online communities. As they’ve grown, it has become increasingly clear that we need online tools to help us navigate the billions of people and petabytes of data that we’re connecting with.

Reputation systems allow us to model things such as trust and preference to use as filters on all of this input. Just think about the shift from the original Yahoo! hand-crafted directory to the reputation-driven Google search engine – that’s happening in domain after domain.

Reputation creates value, and value begets optimization begets abuse. Just as Google has spawned the SEO (Search Engine

Optimization) industry, reputation abuse has appeared in eBay, Digg, and even Twitter.