Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Chip Morningstar: I’ve been involved in network social stuff for a long, long time. I was originally involved with something called Project Xanadu way back in the late 70s and early 80s that was the original hypertext project prior to the World Wide Web. I was just very interested in what would happen if people could put documents online and link them together.

After that I went to Lucasfilm, where I did a number of things that were noteworthy, but mainly I worked on Habitat, where I was the team leader and designer of the game. I’ll say it was mostly my idea, but I can’t claim sole credit for it. The original notion of it emerged from a conversation with my office mate, but I took the idea and ran with it. Eventually I came up with this notion of this vast extended universe where there’d be a world populated by real users and you could go and have adventures together. All the kinds of things that people do in today’s standard MMOs. That notion evolved into Habitat.

I brought Randy into that project fairly early on, and we have become very close collaborators because of that over the years. That’s also the reason why you typically hear both of our names mentioned simultaneously whenever you hear about us.

Randy and I then went to American Information Exchange where I worked on a very early attempt at E-commerce. Mind you, this was all still pre-web. The radical idea there was that there were lots of information services available where people could buy information, but this was an actual service where people could buy and sell information services to each other. It was really designed to be a pre-web marketplace.

While this was occurring, we were also receiving a lot of interest for the previous work we’d done with Habitat. It was with this interest in mind that we put together the first “Lessons of Habitat”  presentation where we presented it at the first cyberspace conference. The lessons generated a lot of interest and quite a vocal reception, and it really launched us on this other career of going around and talking to people about what we had experienced during Habitat.

It turns out that we were really the first into the fray in a bunch of stuff that people were very interested in but had no experience with. We had the experience and stories that they wanted. When AMiX met its unfortunate end, we looked around for a different thing to do and started up our consulting partnership.

During this time, we ended up working with Fujitsu where we oversaw the reintroduction of Habitat into the U.S. in the form of a service called WorldsAway. We spent half of our time doing that and the other half focused on more forward looking work.

All of that forward looking material ended up being the basis for Communities.com, which we would spend the next eight years working on. It was WAY too technically ambitious, but at the same time very interesting.

Eventually, Randy landed at Yahoo then I landed at Yahoo. We did some interesting things there, but now we’re done there and looking for the right project to start with next.

Randy Farmer: To tease out some of the MMO stuff Chip was talking about, the first real virtual world with avatars, exchangeable objects, and people selling items for money was Lucasfilm’s Habitat. That was actually the beta title for the game, the shipping title was called Club Caribe.

I know that Ten Ton Hammer has a focus on the game side of things, but games and social media (or social networking) have all been blending into each other since the whole concept emerged. When we were working on the American Information Exchange (AMiX), there were game design elements throughout the product. However, the game elements are a lot easier to see in a product like Flickr, which is nominally a website about uploading photos, but if you look closely it has reputation systems and all these pieces that make it into a big game. Game mechanics and social media have always been intertwined.

Back to the MMOs! There were a series of evolutions on Habitat, with the first being the Japanese version named Fujitsu Habitat, which was done around 1990-1991. Fujitsu got really interested in the project and they wanted to bring it back over to the United States. The title eventually got re-released in the states as WorldsAway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldsAway), and it launched a whole batch of spin-offs and are under the moniker Vzones.

Another thing that happened at Communities.com was that we actually merged with two other companies, one named Palace Incorporated and the other called OnLive. Both of these companies made virtual worlds as well. Strangely enough, the worlds that these companies created actually outlived the companies that were trying to make money off of them.

So if we back up a little bit, Chip and I were actually working on our second generation of MMOs before the first real graphics-based MMORPG hit the market. WorldsAway actually released the same year that Ultima Online hit the marketplace, and that was also about the same time that we released the Lessons of Habitat.

There’s also a sequel presentation that has yet to be released on the Internet named Habitat Redux, which talks a little bit about the lessons learned fifteen years after the original paper was released. For those folks that are interested, a bunch of the lessons from Habitat Redux are actually available on the Habitat Chronicles blog.

Personally, I have a bit more experience on the MMOG front than Chip because I was briefly the Live Producer for the Sims Online. It was about a four month stint.

Randy: It wasn’t actually as cool as you’d imagine.

Randy: It was definitely educational. One thing I’d like to say is that, during my entire time at EA Maxis, that I proposed that if the Sims Online were going to succeed that it needed to center itself around user generated content rather than porting The Sims latest content. They created a bunch of freight trains that just ported the latest content from The Sims into The Sims Online.

It turned out be a not incredibly compelling experience. So I made a big push to say that we should stop doing that and turn the game into a platform for users to create their own content, then buy and sell it with each other. I didn’t think it was rocket science because Maxis was literally running a site that did exactly that for just The Sims. People were uploading content, putting prices on it, and selling it to each other.

I wondered why the company couldn’t just move that over into The Sims Online. It’s now been five years since I worked there, and they just repositioned The Sims Online to do just that.

One thing that is kind of unfair about being in our position is that we get to pick and choose when we can point out the areas where we were right. On the other hand, if you look at our very own papers – Lessons of Habitat and Habitat Redux – we also spend some time talking about areas where we were wrong. Just because you’re a veteran doesn’t mean that you were always right.

Chip: In fact, you often learn more from your mistakes then your successes.

Randy: Absolutely. Usually our successes are just happy accidents. You believe that all of the stuff you do is going to work, but only some of it does.

One last little tidbit about me and my MMO experience: I’m actually on the board of advisors for Areae and Raph Koster’s Metaplace project. So I do keep in contact with the industry quite a bit.

Randy: Back when we were at Communities.com, we were building a platform for people to build things on top of. We were ahead of our time.

This is a similar play, but it bits off the correct hard problems. It bites off scaling and compatibility and a bunch of the right problems while not biting off any of the wrong ones. I’m actually very impressed, and I’m one of their alpha developers. I’m porting back my first multiplayer game into Metaplace.

I think they’ve really got something. The question is: Can they market it appropriately? Can they get developers to produce the content that produces the diversity?

I don’t know if you know, but they’ve already put out their first alpha-feeler. They call it MetaChat, and it’s essentially an application that moves the Metaplace chat function to your MySpace page. If you go to MySpace and type in MetaChat, you’ll find their application. You can find it, download it, and use it.

It’s a really decent, multi-user, graphical chat, that you can run in your browser.

Randy: No, and this is one of the challenges. It can be that core gaming experience, but in order to do that you have to develop an appropriate program. It’s one of the problems that we’ve had developing platforms, where you always have to develop a reference application to show people how the server works. But as soon as you do that, everyone gets distracted by the reference application.

In fact, that’s not at all it. If anyone knows how to build one of those big games, it’d be Raph Koster. He built Ultima Online then Star Wars Galaxies. He’s already developed the server part, now someone just has to develop the game part on top of the platform.

Farmer is on the board of advisors for Raph Koster's Metaplace.

Chip: There’s also something about the whole ecosystem here where you have a producer versus consumer issue with the platform system. In order to get the sort of wide uptake, world wide phenomenon sort of thing going, you need to have a large community of consumers.

If you look at the whole slate of offerings on the virtual world, MMO market, you see this consumer versus producer dynamic played out a lot. My current pair of examples is to contrast Second Life with World of Warcraft. On the one hand you have a pure producer environment, while on the other you have a pure consumer one.

They’re wildly different from each other, but in the one case it’s mostly interesting to the people creating things and less so to people who are consuming stuff. On the other side, it’s a completely closed system and all you can do is consume whatever the operators of the service have chosen to provide for you. Fortunately they’re really good at that, and World of Warcraft becomes an interesting experience.

Randy: One of the other things to bring into the discussion concerning Areae is that it is between those two extremes. If you look at games, there are plenty of them that fall between the two extremes.

Really, there’s a pile of money to be had with games like World of Warcraft, but there’s also a pile of money to be had making casual games. Casual games are generating a huge amount of money. Yahoo has an entire division dedicated to casual games. Sure they like the big games and the people playing World of Warcraft, but the people that are buying $25 a pop to buy the latest version of Bejeweled are generating small fortunes. You need platforms for the generation of those games and bringing them to a multi-user environment.

If you just look at the casual games market, Metaplace is certainly targeted at the “gamer”. But if you want to know if Metaplace can build the next WoW killer on top of its platform, I don’t have an answer to that question. It certainly could.

What's your opinion of Randy and Chip's early Habitat project? What about Metaplace? Let us know on the forums!