Lucasfilm's Habitat

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer take readers down the path of creating and running their world known as Habitat. The article is, in a way, a brief guide of things to focus on and things to avoid, seemingly aimed at those who might create such a world as Habitat in the future. They describe what Habitat is – a “many-player online cirtual environment” (664) – and take readers through a brief rundown of both the technical and social limitations of the game are. On the technical side, there were issues such as figuring out how to implement all of the features in such a way that their technology could handle. How will players interact with objects? How will they interact with each other? How will all of that data be transmitted back and forth between servers and players in such a way that they don’t experience crippling lag, and how can it be done to ensure that players don’t find technical loopholes to exploit and gain unfair advantages? These are just some of the many questions the creators of Habitat had to ask themselves. Socially, there were just as many issues, and it was these issues that led to the most interesting and enlightening discoveries about how people interact with each other in an online environment.

Something the creators of Habitat tried to do initially was plan out massive events that players could play through. The planning would take hundreds of hours, but the creators felt it was a worth investment because it would provide many players days of enjoyment. In reality, their many hour long event 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” (671). This led to many players feeling confused and unhappy because they did not get their own chance to participate in the action. This event led to an important discovery: you can’t try and plan everything when there are other people involved. As the creators later noted, “The more people we involved in something, the less in control we were” (671). For most people, being forced into a certain path to do something is much less fun than having a hand in developing it yourself, and this event was a great example of that. When the creators recognized this and began to implement ideas suggested by the community, the feedback was much more positive.

Another key point the creators learned the hard way was “you can’t trust anyone” (672). Though the story behind this revelation is long, in a nutshell it involved player’s “cheating” to gain an advantage over other players, an issue that hadn’t been present in most games because they were single player experiences, so cheating only affects you. When there are multiple people involved in the same game, cheating becomes more than a single person experience, and steps have to be taken to prevent it. The creators of Habitat naively expected people to not want to detract from the game play of others, and they had to learn a lesson once it eventually happened.

Personally, I find that I agree with both of those major revelations. When you are interacting with people, be it in real life or in an online format such as Habitat, the most interesting aspect of the event is the other people present and the spontaneous ideas that often spring up. By forcing people to do a certain thing, that level of spontaneity is diminished, as is the overall experience. In regards to not being able to trust people, there is no doubt that that is often the case. While most people do not want to put others at a disadvantage, there are definitely people out there who would not hesitate to do so. With these thoughts in mind, I ask you to think about the following questions:

1) What are some other key things that need to be kept in mind in regards to human social interaction when designing a world such as Habitat?

2) If you were one of the players who discovered the token trick in Habitat (page 673-674, starting in the second to last paragraph on 673), what would you have done? Why?

3) A great debate in the Habitat world was whether or not to allow guns, killing and otherwise unkind behavior to other players. What is your opinion? Should that sort of thing be allowed in a video game world or does it make it too much of an unpleasant experience?