Part One: The Rise of the Avatar

The promise of virtual reality was built on a hardware revolution attempting to envelop individuals in three-dimensional, multi-sensorial experiences. By the mid-1960s, pioneers like Ivan Sutherland at MIT were designing head-mounted display systems and wired data gloves. In the late 1980s, a second wave of acolytes (including John Walker at Autodesk and Jaron Lanier at VPL Research) helped popularize this fascinating mix of science and science fiction. But beyond the goggles and the gloves, virtual reality never lived up to our initial expectations. When attention and capital shifted to supporting progress in networking and internet capabilities, virtual reality quietly shifted focus to educational applications, like simulations for the medical, military, and transportation industries. The dream that humans could be transported by technology into endless digital landscapes never fully evaporated: it found a strong ally with nascent computer gaming enthusiasts and game-based human proxies called avatars. Since their inception, avatars have evolved from simple line drawings to complex vector graphics imbued with much more than bits and bytes.

One of the first gamers to apply his competitive passion to the computer screen was Will Crowther. By 1973, Crowther was working for technology pioneer BBN — the company responsible for developing internet packet switching. In his spare time, Crowther enjoyed spelunking and rock climbing. He shaped these into Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure), an early computer game where a player moves through an imaginary cave using simple text commands and computer responses. In 1976 Don Woods at Stanford University’s artificial intelligence lab played the game and asked Crowther if he could enhance the experience. Together, they added code that let players pick up, use, or drop objects. They also included fantasy elements based on their shared interest in the classic role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). By having players interact with characters like dwarves, elves, and trolls, Crowther and Woods abandoned the real world and directed players into early immersive role play.

Maze War

Maze War was developed by Steve Colley at NASA’s Ames Research Center, introduced around the same time as Adventure. A shooting game, Maze War had a three-dimensional graphic interface and, with the help of co-workers who linked two computers together, multi-player gaming capabilities. Most interesting was that on screen, players were represented as eyeballs — a rudimentary sort of avatar. Maze War spawned the development of other multi-player games, many of which were based on fantasy role play and the popularity of D&D. Inspired by these, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle — students at Essex University in England — developed the first multi-user text-based game in 1978. They named it MUD — “multi-user dungeon,” another nod to fantasy role play. Bartle described MUD as, “Originally little more than a series of interconnected locations where you could move and chat.” After several rewrites, MUD1 became highly interactive, providing a social network for like-minded gamers to battle monsters and create friendships, all within the context of a virtual medieval world. MUD1 became popular with students at Essex University and eventually with a global audience who could connect to the game through ARPANet. Just over a decade later, computer scientist James Apnes built on the success of MUDs with TinyMUD, a flexible virtual world that gave players the tools to build their own objects, rooms, and puzzles — a precursor to more complex worlds like Second Life. Technology professionals saw the success and rapid growth of MUDs in the 1980s as a turning point and recognition that virtual reality, with its bulky hardware and high costs, could not deliver the social or thematic experiences that audiences craved. It marked the ascendancy of software over hardware as the vehicle taking us into a virtual dimension.

The 1980s saw the release of several precedent-setting computer games. Island of Kesmai was developed by John Taylor and Kelton Flinn and played on the CompuServe network for $6 or $12 an hour (depending on dial-up connectivity). Island of Kesmai was a multi-player game, included an option to change the look of avatars, and introduced the D&D concept of “levelling” — gathering experience and skill points to give avatars additional tools and abilities. Lucasfilm combined the best of text-based, object oriented social worlds with advanced computer graphics in something they called Habitat. Started in 1985 and launched in 1986, Habitat was developed by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. They credited Vernor Vinge and his 1981 science fiction novella True Names as their inspiration. The novella describes a group of computer impresarios and an immersive virtual reality called “the Other Plane.” Vinge’s novella is grouped with the literary genre “cyberpunk.” (The genre’s most notorious author William Gibson wrote the book Neuromancer in which he describes a world where humans can plug into “cyberspace.”) Several years later, Neal Stephenson would pen Snow Crash and introduce us to the “metaverse” — a literary precursor to much of what virtual worlds have become.

Habitat

In Habitat, avatars populated a series of towns, natural landscapes, and architectural spaces. Lucasfilm was the first to use the word “avatar,” from ancient Sanskrit, which describes the human or bodily manifestation of a higher being. Since Habitat’s avatars could move freely, make gestures, manipulate objects, and barter for goods and services, the name seemed appropriate. Habitat started out as a series of in-world hobbies, games, and puzzles but eventually evolved to facilitate interactivity between players, relying on them to collectively define the in-world environment. Getting to that point was a learning experience for both players and developers. Morningstar and Farmer described this journey when they presented their work at The First International Conference on Cyberspace in 1990:

“The idea behind our world was precisely that it did not come with a fixed set of objectives for its inhabitants, but rather provided a broad palette of possible activities from which the players could choose, driven by their own internal inclinations. It was our intention to provide a variety of possible experiences, ranging from events with established rules and goals (a treasure hunt, for example) to activities propelled by the players’ personal motivations (starting a business, running the newspaper) to completely free-form, purely existential activities (hanging out with friends and conversing).”

Their initial intentions, however, ran into problems, and they quickly realized that they were in over their heads.

“Our original, contractual specification for Habitat called for us to create a world capable of supporting a population of 20,000 avatars, with expansion plans for up to 50,000. Moreover, a virtual world such as Habitat needs to scale with its population. For 20,000 avatars we needed 20,000 “houses,” organized into towns and cities with associated traffic arteries and shopping and recreational areas. We needed wilderness areas between the towns so that everyone would not be jammed together into the same place. Most of all, we needed things for 20,000 people to do. They needed interesting places to visit — and since they can’t all be in the same place at the same time, they needed a lot of interesting places to visit — and things to do in those places. Each of those houses, towns, roads, shops, forests, theaters, arenas, and other places is a distinct entity that someone needs to design and create. Attempting to play the role of omniscient central planners, we were swamped.”

On one occasion Habitat programmers spent weeks planning, coding, and building an intricate treasure hunt. They unveiled the exciting opportunity to players and expected it would take days, if not weeks, to solve. They were extremely surprised when a player managed to crack the clues and win the hunt in just eight hours — before most players even had a chance to get started. Their hard work trivialized, Morningstar and Farmer realized that serving as de-facto cruise directors for their in-world audience wasn’t going to work.

“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.”

Letting players drive the game left Lucasfilm struggling with the question of when or if they should exert control over in-world behaviors. What they may not have known at the time was that the choices they made had social and potential legal repercussions in Habitat and the real world. The initial release of Habitat allowed players to steal from one another by grabbing an object out of an avatar’s hands and running away with it. Habitat also allowed players to kill each other using in-world weapons. Death not only resulted in a teleportation “home” but also meant that any object in an avatar’s hand would drop to the ground for another player to pick up. Other possessions being “carried” by an avatar on their digital person were lost for good. This may not seem controversial considering Habitat was just a game, but as economist Edward Castronova has detailed in his essays on virtual worlds, real world property rights extend to virtual objects. Writing years after Habitat‘s launch, Castronova argued that players invest time and skill to create or collect objects. Because those objects can then be sold in open markets like Ebay or bartered to other players, in-world activity generates real economic value. Developing Habitat before Ebay, Morningstar and Farmer never thought about murder as it relates to property rights, but they did consider how avatars should be treated.

“At the core of much of the debate was an unresolved philosophical question: is an avatar an extension of a human being (thus entitled to be treated as you would treat a real person) or a Pac-Man-like critter destined to die a thousand deaths or something else entirely? Is Habitat murder a crime? Should all weapons be banned? Or is it all just a game?”

In the end they decided to outlaw stealing and murder within Habitat‘s city limits, leaving the wilderness between cities a dangerous place. The game operated until 1988. An improved version was licensed to the Japanese technology company Fujitsu and eventually became the more sophisticated WorldsAway running on the CompuServe network. Morningstar and Farmer wrapped up their presentation at the International Conference on Cyberspace with this conclusion:

“The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented…While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies — DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on — both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We can’t help having a nagging sense that it’s all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment.”

For all the digital ink dedicated to Habitat, it was just the start. A tipping point arrived sometime just after the millennium when world builders harnessed advances in software and broadband connectivity to provide a successful mix of virtual reality, challenge, and entertainment. Eager players signed up and the business of gaming exploded throughout the 1990s. It even garnered the acronym, MMORPG (Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game). The most popular included the first web-based game, Meridian 59 (1996), as well as Ultima Online (1997), Lineage (1998), and EverQuest (1999). Newer releases like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Star Wars Galaxies continue to generate enthusiasm. Asia has always represented the largest percentage of gamers, and China’s rapid adoption of technology has helped fuel the MMORPG boom. The exact number of active players is hard to pin down: sources cite a range between twenty and seventy million. DFC Intelligence — a consulting firm dedicated to interactive entertainment — predicts that the online game market will grow from $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005 to $13 billion by 2011. The numbers show more people are participating in virtual worlds. We should expect that the naturally addictive qualities of gaming, fused with high quality immersive environments, will mean more hours per player spent in-world. How many hours it takes before the effects of immersion bleed beyond the game and into real life is also a bit of a guessing game, as are the impending results.

What is fact or fiction, real or synthetic? This is the most significant question regarding the virtual experience. Slaying a fierce dragon, casting a spell, or wearing a cloak of invisibility is a synthetic experience. But not all activity in-world is fictional. Gamers will tell you stories of the money they’ve made or the real relationships forged out of virtual play, some even ending in marriage. Unlike traditional games with regulated risk/reward scenarios and a certain amount of flexibility within the construct of the game, social worlds represent a dangerous mix of fact and fiction.

Second Life Wedding

The first large scale release of a social world was The Sims Online (2002) but it was Second Life, launched a year later, that redefined what it means to “be” in-world. Using a model that gives each player the tools they need to build out their part of the world, Second Life is celebrated as free-form, unregulated, and unburdened. The danger of Second Life is that it mirrors the physicality of the real world yet impresses upon people the excitement of the synthetic. Each player or resident relates to the virtual world differently. For some it’s fantasy role play, for others, an extension of their real life interests and activities. These contrasting intentions are akin to the Wild West where anything goes and new social and legal challenges will constantly bleed between players, and in turn, real and virtual worlds. The facilitators or culprits, depending on your point of view, are avatars. These cunning surrogates are becoming more human — with accurately rendered visual characteristics — and more inhuman — with purely imaginative functional capabilities. The more they look like us, the more we treat and react to them as if they were and the more dangerous our in-world interactions become.

Next Installment: The Role of the Avatar