Dramatic Interactors - Computers as Theatre - page 120

are power, and groups of like-minded individuals can take meaningful po-
litical action. One may enjoy the lives of one's children by “friending” them
on Facebook (ahem).
Habitat , developed by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Morningstar at
Lucasfi lm, was fi rst launched as a prototype in 1986. It stands as an ex-
tremely important transitional form. More than a series of chat rooms or
a community like the WELL, Habitat was a graphical virtual community
that was both a descendant of the forum and an antecedent to massively
multiplayer online games. They called their interactors “players” because
they meant the world to be an environment for entertainment and play.
Each player took on an “Avatar”—a graphical representation of a charac-
ter with various signifi ers—to represent them. One could also argue that
Habitat foreshadowed what became “social media” in the early 2000s (ava-
tars got married in Habitat —in-world only, of course). Randy and Chip's
vision was to make a real instance of “cyberspace,” which, they asserted,
was “necessarily a multiple-participant environment” (Morningstar and
Farmer 1991). Each of the thousands of “regions” in the game contained
“a set of objects which defi ne the things that an Avatar can do there.” The
object-oriented approach in building the system was the key to the sort of
play that was enabled.
Chip and Randy were constantly observing and tweaking the proto-
type precisely because it was not a game with rigid rules:
Habitat . . . was deliberately open-ended and pluralistic. The idea behind
our world was precisely that it did not come with a fi xed set of objec-
tives for its inhabitants, but rather provided a broad palette of possible
activities from which the players could choose, driven by their own in-
ternal inclinations.
The unexpected actions of players kept Chip and Randy busy, both
writing new code and intervening in-world as Avatars. They, like Pavel
Curtis, were working at the transformation point of the role of “modera-
tor” from sys-admin to dynamic designer of a community. The success of
the prototype and its infl uence on future forms demonstrate how robustly
interactions among participants can shape the dramatic action.
Of course, “non-game” interaction did not end with Habitat's excursion
into an entertaining, graphical, social world. But I see Habitat as a pivotal
precursor to later online communities—the world of wikis, Web sites, and