[HN Gopher] The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)
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The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat (1990)
Author : kuba-orlik
Score : 157 points
Date : 2023-10-22 18:05 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.stanford.edu)
| jruohonen wrote:
| A great find! There is also some real wisdom regarding the
| warning they gave.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| There are several retrospectives on Habitat in Vernor Vinge's
| tech anthology True Names.
| a1o wrote:
| You can do something like that over IRC without much fuss! As in
| IRC as a backend.
| sakjur wrote:
| What strikes me about the system described by the article is
| that it predates IRC by a couple of years.
|
| I wonder if IRC could've been built on Habitat's backend
| equally well as the other way around is easy to imagine.
| wmf wrote:
| Wasn't Glitch built on an IRC backend (which later became
| Slack)?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Microsoft Comic Chat -- they had Jim Woodring do the comic book
| characters and environmental graphics!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Woodring
|
| https://www.jimwoodring.com/
| gattilorenz wrote:
| And you can still use it, although it's probably a very...
| lonely experience:
| https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/01/18/teaching-an-old-irc-
| dog-...
| Animats wrote:
| That's famous. I knew those guys.
|
| What amazed me is that they were able to cram a graphical client
| into a _Commodore 64_. Now that was a cram job. I could see doing
| the world on minicomputer servers, but the client!
|
| Those early 2D metaverses not only predate the consumer Internet,
| they predate AOL. They were all superseded by things that looked
| more like the early web.
|
| Round 2 of that was when 3D Second Life was overtaken by mostly-
| text Facebook.
|
| Recently we had the Web 3 "metaverse" debacle. You can build it,
| but will they come?
|
| These things are fun, but they're a niche, like games.
| ben_jones wrote:
| "You can build it, but will hundreds of millions of users come
| instantaneously in desired markets and earn billions in high
| margin ways with minimal support costs and in a way that is
| preferred by the majority shareholder?"
|
| Success exists outside the success criteria of Google and Meta.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Stewart Butterfield developed a 2d massively multi player game
| called "Game Neverending":
|
| https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Neverending
|
| It let users create and upload content like text and pictures,
| so it had a nice image uploader component and content
| management system.
|
| That didn't work out, so they took the image uploader and cms
| and pivoted to making an app called "Flickr", which Yahoo
| bought.
|
| Later on he redeveloped a new version of GNE in Flash called
| "Glitch", that was a whole lot like Habitat, in that it had
| these long horizontal areas you could walk left and right
| around, and chat with other people with avatars, and do fun
| stuff.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(video_game)
|
| That didn't work out either, so he took the rooms based chat
| messaging back-end, and pivoted to an app named "Slack".
| Animats wrote:
| Did not know that. Such a progression is not unexpected,
| though.
| notbeuller wrote:
| My company makes us use slack - started during lockdown - as
| an electron app. I don't know it's history or its user
| culture, but for me it has been a wretched experience all
| around and I wish we'd have just stuck with email, or jabber
| or whatever. Slack has a faux corporate friendliness that
| makes me feel like I'm in some corporate "we're having fun
| and a potentially pizza" dental appointment with a therac-25
| rigged to make X-rays on flayed kittens. I don't ever want my
| software to say "oops" and I certainly don't want my business
| software to offer more ways to "engage" with irrelevant
| content.
| amatecha wrote:
| Glitch was really fun! My wife and I still joke about "Yellow
| Crumbs" every so often. I'm really pleased to see our
| profiles are still hosted on the website[0] in perpetuity.
| Was nice to see all my shared screenshots are still up on
| there... awesome :)
|
| [0] http://www.glitchthegame.com/
| davexunit wrote:
| I've been told that they even had a _garbage collector_ on the
| Commodore 64 client.
| mtillman wrote:
| Along these lines, my co-founder worked with Spielberg on an
| early virtual world for children with chronic diseases:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbright_World. I'd be shocked if
| they didn't use some of these lessons from the Lucas ecosystem.
| luismedel wrote:
| This is great. I didn't know that Mutiny[0] from Halt And Catch
| Fire was based on a real service.
|
| [0] https://www.ryannelson.me/projects/hcf/
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I love the subject matter of Halt and Catch fire but felt let
| down by the story telling.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| You felt let down by what is generally considered one of the
| best written shows of the 2010s?
|
| I say that because maybe you need to give it a second chance.
| Season 4 character payoff is some of the best tv ever period.
| bananaboy wrote:
| Personally I bounced off it pretty hard halfway through the
| first season. I really wanted to like it because of the
| subject matter but I found all the characters very
| unlikeable and unsympathetic. I didn't find myself caring
| whether any of them succeeded.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| That's exactly where I stopped. I really didn't
| understand _why_ any of the characters were doing
| anything, and why I should care.
|
| The pacing was quite slow, I also didn't enjoy westworld
| for the exact same reason, so maybe i'm just not the
| right kind of person.
| fxd123 wrote:
| I enjoyed it but "best written shows of the 2010s" is an
| exaggeration
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Not at all.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The writing through the first season was pretty good, but
| also pretty mixed.
|
| The general technology/corporate story arcs were pretty
| great, but a lot of the scenes they wrote for Joe MacMillan
| (Lee Pace) were atrocious. The writers basically kept
| changing his fundamental character traits every episode.
| Lee's a great actor and did the best anyone realistically
| could with the material, but it was a complete mess in
| terms of the writers introducing constant character
| whiplash. And then the way Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) was
| written as a romantic arc with him, I'm not sure anybody
| could have cared less if they wound up together or not, or
| never talked again the rest of their lives.
|
| I've heard the fourth season is spectacular, and I'd like
| to get back to it someday, but the first season really
| wasn't strong enough to keep a lot of viewers, including
| myself.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > You felt let down by what is generally considered one of
| the best written shows of the 2010s?
|
| By "generally" I'm guessing you just mean yourself?
|
| I thought the writing was pretty weak. They kept falling
| back on silly tropes to force some drama into the show
| rather than letting the subject matter itself be the drama.
| It very much felt like they "jumped the shark" right from
| the very first episode.
|
| Very few of those characters were believable, let alone
| likeable.
|
| I do agree season 4 is better, but and the reason why is
| because the dialled it back on the writing and focused a
| lot more on the characters. Which is what they should have
| done from the start.
|
| The writing for me felt a lot more like they didn't have
| confidence that the subject matter is interesting enough on
| its own. Which is a sign of bad writing, not good writing.
|
| That all said, there were some good moments. But on the
| whole it just wasn't _great_. However there isn't many
| shows based around this subject so I guess some geeks try
| to convince themselves that the show was better than it
| actually was. But each to their own I guess
| tsunamifury wrote:
| HN seems to strongly disagree. So many your dog whistle
| insults are wrongly pointed.
| pests wrote:
| What? It's been 45 minutes... 30 minutes before you
| replied. Give things a chance to settle.
| serf wrote:
| I don't know what 'dog-whistle insults' even means in
| this case; but ignoring that, I thought the show _sucked_
| , too.
|
| In my case I think it's an aversion to specialized
| marketing. I hated Silicon Valley, too; I think it's a
| lack of distance from the topic which makes me overthink
| the thing rather than just having fun with the story.
|
| But with HACF I didn't just dislike the topic, I thought
| the acting was corny and stiff and I thought that the
| characters were unmotivated throughout the thing, with
| motivation being replaced with pseudo-historical
| anecdote. I thought the actors were poorly cast, and I
| feel like they did a bad job 'convincing' me of anything.
|
| "Of course they're doing the thing, that's who Z is!"
| isn't compelling enough for me to enjoy it and suspend my
| real personality from interjecting criticism during the
| watch.
|
| But who cares what I think : i've been out of lock-step
| with the crowd for a few years w.r.t. media consumption.
| Amazon/Netflix/Disney/whoever, AMC in this case shouldn't
| be considering what I think when toting their bags of
| money to the bank.
| boulos wrote:
| I felt the first season primarily mimicked The Soul of a New
| Machine. Taken from that angle, I found it quite good.
|
| Amusingly, when I read that book, I mistook it for fiction.
| Kidder's narrative non-fiction style was so detailed I
| assumed it couldn't have been from notes or interviews.
| andrehacker wrote:
| O, this show, basically the Forrest Gump story of computing in
| the 80's/90's: the main cast somehow is a significant part or
| straight out inventors of every piece of technology of that
| timeframe: on-line gaming, social networking, online
| marketplace, dot com. The acting is.. interesting: Lee Pace
| trying to channel Don Draper, Scoot McNairy being Scoot, Kerry
| Bishe just doing a bit of over-acting and Mackenzie Davis,
| well, she's cool.
|
| Loved to hate that show in the first run. Then streamed it 4
| more times (playing in the background, but still): the accuracy
| of depiction of technology, startup issues regarding funding,
| liaisons and other ups and downs, personalities in tech: thumbs
| up.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| In the first season I thought "Oh, this company is supposed
| to be Compaq?" but then realized Compaq was one of many
| companies that all got the exact same idea at the exact same
| time. After that realization I saw the characters and their
| projects as tragic also-rans with a series of near-successes.
| pkd wrote:
| The first season was the weakest. Seasons 2-4 are some of the
| best television ever IMHO. Once they stopped trying to make
| it Mad Men with tech, they freed themselves up to succeed.
| lou1306 wrote:
| HACF is probably the most criminally underrated show in
| recent television history. Yeah the basic premise might be a
| Mad Men tech rehash, and yeah you kind of have to endure
| season 1 before you get to the good part, but the characters
| are so wonderfully crafted that I still think about them >5
| years after watching it.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| My thoughts exactly as I was reading the publication. Also, had
| an instant flashback to the girls buying dubious XT machines
| off of the back of some shady truck!
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Note that Randy Farmer is now the CEO of Spritely Institute,
| which is taking the lessons from Habitat and other work and
| applying them into the modern networking and social media
| context: https://spritely.institute/
| shaunxcode wrote:
| Awww that explains the habitat references in the irc channel! I
| mean I was happy about it but now it makes even more sense.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| This was later adapted into Club Caribe for Q-Link. I regard it
| as deeply unfair that only those of us born in a brief window of
| history got to experience the pure magic this represented at the
| time. It lit up areas of the imagination like nothing before or
| since.
| adamomada wrote:
| Even if you were there at the time and had the equipment, don't
| forget how expensive it was for someone to get on the service.
| I think it's one of the main reasons (local) BBSes caught on:
| it was something to do with your $200 1200 bps modem that
| didn't cost much
| mistrial9 wrote:
| .. definitely paid around $400 for a modem in the early 90s;
| 9600 baud with error correction and link safeties
| ghaff wrote:
| Even relatively local BBSs could rack up the phone charges if
| you didn't have a very local dial-in. Intra-state long
| distance wasn't necessarily much cheaper than interstate.
|
| But the hourly charges by a service like Compuserve,
| especially at higher bit rates, were a _lot_.
| pastage wrote:
| I racked up +$300 in monthly phone charges in my early teens,
| that was an early and hard lesson of the value of flat fees.
| 01100011 wrote:
| My grandpa disowned me after running up $300 on qlink and
| another $300 in phone charges to BBSes when I was 12. I
| talked to him briefly on the phone twice after that in the
| next decade or so before he died and he never got over it.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Lessons of Lucasfilm 's Habitat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822691 - April 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Lessons of Lucasfilm 's Habitat (1990)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8255850 - Sept 2014 (10
| comments)
|
| _The Lessons of Lucasfilm 's Habitat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70180 - Oct 2007 (1 comment)
| ulrischa wrote:
| Wow it was way ahead of its time! While we now have many online
| virtual worlds, Habitat did it when the internet itself was still
| in its infancy. It laid the foundation for many of the online
| multiplayer games and virtual spaces we see today.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Habitat had pie menus, and the Japanese version let you "bow" and
| perform other gestures and animations by stroking in different
| directions.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Also by the authors of Habitat, Randy and Chip, presented at the
| Second International Conference on Cyberspace:
|
| How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure, by
| Chip Morningstar, June 1993.
|
| "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." --
| Donald Norman
|
| http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Chip was the first real software engineering mentor I ever had.
| He taught me about simplicity and the importance of getting
| software to work first and foremost.
|
| He also imparted the sage wisdom that premature optimization is
| the root of all evil.
| juliangamble wrote:
| This was written to a target audience who had all read Cyberpunk
| novels and imagined it as the future. See the references:
|
| [2] Gibson, William (1984), Neuromancer, Ace Books, New York.
|
| [3] Bruce Sterling, ed. (1986), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk
| Anthology, Arbor House, New York.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I would not wish neuromancer upon the future.
| bisq wrote:
| I think the world of neuromancer would be an improvement over
| what awaits.
| davexunit wrote:
| You can actually play Habitat today. Randy Farmer, one of the
| developers, has an open source project called Neohabitat that has
| preserved the game. http://neohabitat.org/
| pbjtime wrote:
| I fuckin love crowdsourcing
| VonGuard wrote:
| This was brought back to working order with the help of
| Randy, Chip, Mist64, StuBlad, McMartin, and some other folks
| who hacked away until it was brought back to working order.
| The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (themade.org)
| undertook this work as the first ever institutional
| preservation of an MMO, and everything was accomplished for
| $0. The MADE is about to collaborate again with Randy and
| Chip on preserving Electric Communities, EC Habitat, and the
| Palace. The Museum has acquired legal waivers to begin this
| preservation project, and will undertake a hack-day on site
| January 13, 2024. Join us and help bring back history!
| smolder wrote:
| I had forgotten all about The Palace. Very cool. (I assume
| you mean the visual chat client by that name?)
| VonGuard wrote:
| Yes indeed. It's sources are already in a private GitHub
| repo, we just need to prune copyrighted things like fonts
| and libraries so we can open source it. That'll start in
| January.
| qdot76367 wrote:
| Oh boy
|
| I have ideas
| amatecha wrote:
| Oh, no way! The Palace was awesome. I spent many hours on
| there, so many years ago. Very stoked to hear about
| this!!
| bullen wrote:
| The real lesson is that the game media/medium does not lend
| itself to linear stories inherited from TV, that inherited from
| film, that inherited from theater.
|
| Games should only be multiplayer. Real-time action multiplayer.
|
| And they should NEVER have cutscenes.
|
| They also can't have music (except live) because 3D sound is
| paramount.
|
| And they should be open-source or source-available so we can
| improve and modify them.
|
| Habitat said all that and I think the article didn't but... you
| know... down votes without comment incoming!
| epolanski wrote:
| That's your personal take.
|
| I too believe gaming should be more about humans interacting,
| but there's millions of people out there that disagree and
| value the story of games.
| bullen wrote:
| People expect comments to not be a personal take?
|
| Linear things destroy your mind, because you become a passive
| consumer.
|
| Producing is the only meaningful purpose in existence, but
| not for someone else, for yourself.
|
| Now it's too late, people are used to sitting on their ass
| and be entertained and pay for that by "working" for an
| "owner". Down votes without comment!
|
| Get off that couch and into a chair with a keyboard and
| mouse, then download a compiler and get cracking! It's not
| hard once you figure out that only Windows and linux can do
| it. And only linux on Risc-V is meaningful in the long term.
|
| We only explored 10% of the action MMO so far, PUBG has been
| the limit with it's janky controls and buggy/slow
| performance.
|
| Imagine a 1000 player 3D Mario, it's totally doable. Just do
| it!
| bowsamic wrote:
| Are we playing a game of "who has the most outrageous life
| philosophy"?
| bisq wrote:
| Don't feed the trolls.
| njharman wrote:
| > People expect comments to not be a personal take?
|
| Some comments are factual; corrections, links, additional
| information, etc.
|
| But people do expect HN to be polite, and "that's your
| personal take" is the polite way to say "you're a loony
| ideologue who sees everything through bi-color (BW) lens".
| pastage wrote:
| I did work on that in 99-01, so much has happened since
| then. Have you done anything else than protocols? We failed
| spectacularly.
|
| Massive Multiplayer is hard to do research on, you can not
| whip something up and have 20k players evaluate it for you.
| Just getting 10 people to consistently test something is
| hard. I guess we could work on improving the MP of generic
| games like Minecraft/Minetest and skip the game logic.
| hoc wrote:
| That poor characterless tree.
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