Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

Author:Thomas Rid [Rid, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-06-27T20:00:00+00:00

Ironically, the actual colonization of cyberspace began on a rather more primitive device: a Commodore 64. It wasn’t real people in virtual space that did the colonizing. It was avatars. In fact, the creators of the early game Habitat—Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer—came up with the idea and with the word “avatar” for the game.

The first version of Habitat was built for the C-64, a common home computer in the mid-1980s that already appeared “ludicrous” to the developers themselves.92 The game was ambitious. Lucasfilm Games, the company that designed the virtual world, envisioned a population of twenty thousand users, with plans to expand to as many as fifty thousand. All these people, the equivalent of a small city, would meet “in a single shared cyberspace,” as two of the lead developers outlined in 1990. Interaction would happen in real time. Users could “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,” Morningstar and Farmer wrote in a famous paper on the lessons of their pioneering game.93

Morningstar and Farmer found much of the work that was done on cyberspace technology in these heady days exciting and promising, but also misplaced. They didn’t appreciate the “almost mystical euphoria” about data gloves and head-mounted displays. Hardware, in the view of the game developers, was a distraction. Cyberspace was not about experiencing hardware; it was about experiencing people. This is also the reason why Vinge was so popular with engineers. He was one of the few science fiction authors who understood that the input-output devices would remain slow and bulky. “The IO devices were very low bit rate,” Vinge said later, explaining how he had constructed True Names. “They depended on the viewer’s imagination to fill the gaps, which is exactly what happens when you read a book.”94 The Habitat engineers had the same approach: the game depended on the player’s imagination to fill the gaps.

Habitat was meant to represent the real world—at least to a degree. The game designers liberally added childhood memories of games of make-believe, “a dash of silliness, a touch of cyberpunk,” and of course, their remarkable technical skills in what was then called “object-oriented programming.” The objects were the furniture of the Habitat world: houses, trees, gardens, mailboxes, books, doors, compasses, but also more controversial objects like clubs, knives, and guns. The game’s little cartoon characters, controlled by the gamer, could buy and sell these items with in-game money that they had in their in-game bank accounts. Tokens were the currency in the land of Habitat, commonly abbreviated simply as T. For each new player joining Habitat, an avatar was created, or “hatched,” and a starting amount of 2,000T was placed in the player’s personal account. Each day the player logged in to the game, the money grew by 100T.

The game was inspired by science fiction, “notably Vernor Vinge’s novel, True Names,” the game designers explained.95 ATMs, which in Habitat stood for “automatic token machines,” gave avatars access to their money.

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