True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (25 page)

Business

The economy was initially a minor issue. Most everybody had plenty of Tokens (except the Passives). In an attempt to open the retail business to Avatars, a drugstore was opened, with a locked room in back that only the owner could enter that contained the only vending machine that sold Habitat healing potions and poisons. The shopkeeper would pay the fixed price, and would charge whatever he wanted for resale. It was a success except for the fact that the owner logged in at strange hours.

Motivators and Caretakers at Work

By far the Caretaker who had the greatest impact on his fellow users was the editor of the Habitat weekly newspaper
The Rant.
This user tirelessly spent twenty to forty hours a week (free account) composing a twenty-, thirty-, forty-, or even fifty-page tabloid containing the latest news, events, and rumors, and even fictional articles. This was no small feat; he had only the barbaric Habitat paper editor, and no other tools. After he had composed the pages of an issue, he would arrange them in several chests of drawers in the
Rant
office and send me mail. I would publish it by using a special host program that would bind them into a book object and distribute it to the news Vendroids, check the copy by hand for errors, and deliver a copy to the office (in Habitat). This worked great, but took massive amounts of his personal time. I began to automate the process further just as the Habitat operation changed hands. The new publisher didn't publish on time, delayed getting the tools ready to speed up creation, made editorial changes (he wanted it to be shorter, less fiction), and he didn't hand-deliver a copy of the final product. The editor quit. Just like in real life: Someone new runs the show and the sensitive leave. Again, these people are rare and should be handled carefully.
The Rant
will never be the same.

Duels

One of the wands we implemented forced the target Avatar to perform the “jump” gesture, accompanied by a “Hah!” word balloon. It was fun for a while, mostly because you could really affect another Avatar, but it got old fast. Soon the users developed a game involving these wands: the Duel. The rules were simple: two combatants, two wands, and one judge. When the judge says “go” the first to “hit” the other with the wand three times wins. Not as easy as it sounds, since the duelists were allowed to run around.

Tours

Another Caretaker was the number one all-time most-traveled Avatar. He also was the longest-lived. When new people started logging in, he took them on guided tours of this strange new world. He made them feel like they had a “friend” in town.

Combat

“Conflict is the essence of drama.” We used this quote in the initial Habitat design document. Habitat (it was then named “Microcosm”) was to have personal combat in the forms of weapons. Most computer games had combat, and we were offering a chance for users to affect each other!

Here is how combat worked. There were ranged weapons and hand-to-hand. An Avatar is born with 255 hit points. (The actual number is masked from the user, and a “general state of health” message gives the user some idea how bad off he is.) While holding the weapon, you select a target and select DO (attack). There is a telecommunications delay that may affect the hit-or-miss result. Each successful attack does some small amount of damage (i.e., 20 points). You are always informed when you are shot, as your Avatar is knocked onto his rump.

As you can see, it would take quite a few hits to “kill” a healthy Avatar. Not only that, but you can avoid being damaged if the attacker can't “touch” you in two ways: 1) by turning into a ghost or 2) running around (not standing still). You use option two when you are in a duel, where you are shooting back. If you really, really are low on hit points, you travel the “wild” regions as a ghost. There are also devices that will restore your hit points. The real problem is communicating this to new users, who are often standing around in a region when a bandit comes along with a gun. The neophyte hears a “bang” and sees his Avatar knocked on his can. Instead of acting, he types a message like “What was that? Why am I sitting down?” Meanwhile, the bandit cranks out another twelve bullets.… Dead beginner probably had all of his money and stuff in his pocket too! This problem was eventually corrected in the Avatar Handbook, explaining that guns are dangerous (something we'd thought people would assume on their own).

The Scheduled Events

R&R Weekend Adventures

These were short (one- to two-hour) quests where a user pressed one of ten magic buttons to receive a clue to find one of ten hidden keys to be used in one of ten hidden safes. These were the all-around best quests to run (there were three of them) because there were always seven to ten winners. The only problem here was the Time Zone problem: The event had to be scheduled so that as many people as possible could participate from the moment it started. QLink access started at 6
P.M
. local time. This meant that for the Californians to have a chance, the adventure would have to start at 9
P.M
. East Coast time at the earliest.

The Money Tree

The Quest for the Money Tree is the first quest an Avatar learns about from reading his free Welcome Wagon version of
The Rant
placed in his turf. There is a tree in a forest that will dispense 100 Tokens for each Avatar only once. Everyone can feel like they have “found” the magic tree.

The Tome of Wealth and Fame

This was also one of the original quests. A certain set of stone tablets was the Tome of Wealth and Fame. If you found it, you were to hide it somewhere else. You would receive a reward based on how long it took the next Avatar to find it. The problem with this quest was that the world was so large that it often took weeks for someone to find the tome. Even if you actively looked for it, it would take days of online time to find.

The Long and Short of Quests

A trend became clear about quests in Habitat. The winners of the “long-range” quests like the D'nalsi Island Adventure were almost always people with free accounts. The freebies would stay on for hours on end to gain wealth, things, and status. The paying customers could only come on for one to two hours a week. The idea that people would be able to “work on” a quest for weeks is bogus. A successful long-range quest must be something that either “everyone” can win or does not provide some significant advantage in the world.

Grand Openings

A real surprise was the popularity of the “Grand Opening.” This is a ribbon-cutting event when new regions were added to the world. Tokens and prizes were often hidden in the new regions, but it seems that the audience (especially the Passives) had an insatiable hunger to see new places and new things. The Grand Opening of the Popustop Arms apartment building was the most heavily attended event of the pilot test.

Disease

One of the more successful “games” we invented for Habitat was the disease. There are three strains: 1) Cooties, 2) Happy Face, 3) Mutant (AKA The Fly). We were only able to test Cooties with live players, but it was a hit. It works like this: Several initial Avatars are infected with a “Cootie” head. This head replaces the current one, and cannot be removed except by touching another non-infected Avatar. Once infected, you cannot be infected again that day. In effect, this game is “tag” and “keep away” at the same time. Often people would allow themselves to be infected just so they could infect “that special person that they know would just hate it!” Every time the disease was introduced, there was an announcement at least a week before, and for at least a week afterward it was the subject of much discussion. One day the plague was spreading, and a female Avatar that was getting married got infected one hour before her wedding! Needless to say, she became very excited, and in a panic until a friend offered to take it off her hands.

Some interesting variations on this are: Infected person must touch two people to cure; this would cause quite a preponderance of infected people late in the day. The “Happy Face” plague: This simple head has the side effect of changing any talk message (word balloons) to come out as “HAVE A NICE DAY!” instead of what they typed.… Can you imagine infecting some unsuspecting soul, and having him respond to you HAVE A NICE DAY!??? ESP and mail still work normally, so the user is not without communications channels. The Mutant Plague: The head looks like the head of a giant housefly and it has the effect of changing talk text to “Bzzz zzzz zzzz.” These were all great fun.

True Magic

Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce, co-creator of VRML, former chair of the Interactive Media Program at the School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California, is the author of
The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination.
I think of him primarily as a scientist.

Sometimes scientists are inspired by science fiction. Many astronauts and space agency scientists will tell you with little prodding how they were inspired either by science fiction they read or by science fiction art. And many in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence have been inspired by
True Names,
as noted in other essays in the book. (In Habitat, my spies tell me, the coinage bore the image of Vernor Vinge.)

In the following wonderful essay, Pesce brings to
True Names
a measure of appreciation that could only have been written by someone who himself lives on the frontier of cyberspace and scientific innovation. Read and enjoy. This piece was written in 1999.

 

 

 

In the beginning was the code, and the code was hanging out with god; soon enough some came to the conclusion that the code was god. All of this happened thousands of years ago, knowledge won, then lost, then rediscovered, like an Atlantean shale erupting from the crystal-clear waters off some Caribbean island. Now archeologists deny its evidences, but a clever few come to read its inscriptions.

Infinity and Singularity

Between the ancestral origins of the human race and the vision of an evolved being as far above ourselves as we tower above our simian cousins, a long sloping curve rises from the Serengeti plains, reaching its asymptote at a defining moment, where it tunnels off into infinity. This—as far back as Nietzsche, or even Francis Bacon—has been the secular vision of a human destiny, a teleology made up in equal parts of optimistic projection and wish fulfillment.

The divining instincts of a scientific culture—which can not call on the deus ex machina to invoke an internal salvation—have poured these dreams of transcendence into the stories of science fiction, using the imagination of the future to chart the course to an extraordinary form which has, of late, come to be known as the
trans-human.
Invariably, these stories have been nearly Gnostic in character, insisting that some thing—the right bit of information, the proper word, the perfect artifact—could transform humanity utterly. An old idea, dating from prehistory, has finally come to consume any speculative adventure into our human futures.

Science fiction articulates its esoteric imaginings in the constant play between something the classical Greeks recognized as
techne,
or doing, and its relation to
ontos,
or being. Science fiction, as such, could not exist before the technological project had begun; in our doing we give birth to
agon,
the test of wills between ourselves and our creations.

Most common are the fictions that begin with Jules Verne, and concern the single artifact—a submarine, flying machine, or death ray—and its consquence for all of humanity. These extraordinary voyages—to use Verne's term—play along the fault line between what we think we are and what we can do. Nemo is no accident, or a tragic figure, but the natural consequence of the intersection between present-day humanity and extraordinary technology. Even
2001: A Space Odyssey
plays on the same themes, as it offers us “Today's man in tomorrow's spaceship, today.”

The room for such stories has grown more narrow as the twentieth century has grown to a close, because—beyond a certain point—the accumulation of artifacts produces a transcendence into infinite possibilities. Lately, we can do more and more; the modern world would seem entirely magical to an Athenian of Plato's day. But to us it is all commonplace, and even the introduction of new artifacts—except perhaps for singular advents, such as the World Wide Web—triggers little more than the flutter of an eyelid. If the relationship between man and artifact is simultaneously both chaotic and prosaic, the vision of technology infinitely extended—the trans-human era—is a steady-state universe where the unbelievable is taken as a given. In George Lucas's
Star Wars
tetralogy, we peer into a world entirely foreign in the perfect extension of its artifacts, something that each of its characters accepts as a given. They can fly between the stars at velocities greater than light, and have computers that can think and react as if human, but there is a curious lack of technical advancement, as if everything that could be done has already been done. Even the Death Star, for all of its malevolence, is just a scaled-up version of the Imperial Battlecruiser, and Obi-Wan Kenobi extols the virtues of old technology as he praises the light saber, “an elegant weapon … for a more civilized age.”

These two genres of science fiction represent our collective best guesses of the human future, organized around the single exceptional artifact or an entirely magical universe crowded with them. Like the one and zero states of digital circuitry, they exclude an unpredictable, dynamic middle, a narrow band of intense, nonlinear activity.