From Habitat to Global Cyberspace
F. Randall Farmer, Chip Morningstar, Douglas Crockford
Electric Communities
Abstract
/Cyberspace.
Interactive Television.
Networked Multimedia.
The Great Convergence.
The Information Superhighway.
The National Information Infrastructure./
/These are all names for the same thing: a huge network connecting
people to other people using computers. Billions of dollars are being
invested to develop this connectivity, ignoring the experience already
available from the online industry. Cyberspace is the next important
telecommunications paradigm: many-to-many communications. The authors
relate their experiences with the Habitat and AMIX online services to
outline the nature of the emerging Global Cyberspace Infrastructure./
The great confusion vs. People first!
News of a so-called "Great Convergence" of television, telephones, and
computers makes good copy for the nation's media. Not too long ago,
these same media were going giddy over another technology with big
promises of changing everything: Virtual Reality. Now that the VR hype
has faded, and the wild promises of many of its pundits have been shown
to be gross exaggerations, one might ask, "Is this convergence hype just
more of the same?" While it is true that many of the interactive TV
demos now making the rounds are mostly high-tech fantasy, our
experiences in developing and running the Habitat and American
Information Exchange commercial services indicate that Cyberspace /is/ a
new medium and that it is already on the road to maturity.
Unlike the Virtual Reality field, the emerging data-highway field has
been evolving over a very long period. Its roots are in the invention
and global deployment of the telephone network. Sending machine-readable
data over this infrastructure is almost as old as the computer. People
have been chatting with each other using computers and modems for over
30 years.
When most interactive television advocates talk about video on demand
and interactive home shopping as "killer apps", they are overlooking a
primary lesson from the telephone and on-line services industries:
People don't want to connect to computers, they want to connect with
each other. Like the fans of the early VR industry, many data highway
enthusiasts are more excited about the technology, and less concerned
with the more important questions, such as, "What is the compelling need
for this?" or, more simply, "Why would anyone want to use this?" They
seem to believe in that famous line from the movie /Field of Dreams/:
"If you build it, they will come."
Consider a lesson from Prodigy: The original Prodigy concept was a
flat-fee information service based on a magazine model. Prodigy's income
would be supplemented by advertising revenue from the commercials that
constantly display on the bottom 20% of the screen. They initially
projected that most usage would be information retrieval and interactive
home shopping. This plan was not unlike the announced "killer app"
schemes for interactive television. The main problem was that this model
wasn't what the customers wanted. Instead of shopping or information
retrieval, the primary customer use for Prodigy turns out to be the
person-to-person services: electronic mail and discussion-oriented
bulletin boards. (Through 1991, only 30% of revenue was the result of
advertising, and we can expect that percentage to decrease significantly
in light of Prodigy's recently announced hourly pricing.) As a result,
Prodigy has changed its pricing system (twice) to be usage based,
adopting a model that is essentially the same as the rest of the
industry, albeit with higher prices. This has caused hundreds of
thousands of their most active customers to defect to other providers
who better understand customers' needs and whose services are more
aggressively priced. People want to connect with people, first and foremost.
Many-to-many communications
Like the telecommunications infrastructure which provides us with
telephone service, and also like the railroad system of a century ago,
the Global Cyberspace Infrastructure will provide a crucial new medium
for communications and trade. Cable television, computer and telephone
companies are betting the farm on it.
Unlike these earlier media, Cyberspace is oriented around the idea of
many-to-many communications. Simply put, this means interaction among a
group of people. Until recently this was only reasonable when the
members of a group were actually all in the same physical location.
Telephone conference calls don't work very well. Participants don't
receive enough cues to know when to speak. There are no facial
expressions or other gestures to serve as a guage of other people's
reactions. Video conferencing attempts to overcome these limitations by
putting the parties into two halves of a room joined by video cameras
and microphones. This works adequately for conferences between two or
three small groups that schedule specific meeting times, but Cyberspace
provides a more flexible alternative.
Persistent places
Cyberspace provides a very different model for many-to-many
communications: one of persistent places. Since a computer is the host
for encounters, the encounter environment can remain persistent across
time, even when you aren't there. These persistent places are the
essence of Cyberspace. They are human-created virtual worlds, each
having its own rules of interaction, each with its own set of
inhabitants working for their own ends.
The Internet connects millions of computers, many of which provide
services to the net at large. Among the most popular of these services
are the MUDs, text-based virtual communities with themes ranging from
fantasy role playing to biology to media research to postmodern culture.
Several are commercial ventures, charging an access fee. Others have
started to form internal all-volunteer governments that pass laws that
limit their fellow citizens' behavior or restrict the powers of the
system administrators. The key point is this: these crude, text-only
worlds are already of such high value to their citizens that these
people will dedicate the time and emotional energy to build a functional
society there.
A starting point: Habitat
Habitat is a graphical many-user virtual online environment, a
make-believe world that people enter using home computers connected via
telephones and packet nets to a centralized host running on a commercial
online information service. It was originally available under the name
Club Caribe through the Commodore 64-only QuantumLink service. It is
currently thriving in Japan as Fujitsu Habitat on the NIFtyServe
service. Efforts are underway to port the Fujitsu version of Habitat to
America on PCs and Macs for Christmas of 1994.
Habitat presents each of its participants with a real-time animated view
into an online simulated world in which people communicate, play games,
go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start
businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and
experiment with self-government.
Habitat has been a rich source of information on the nature of building
and managing these new virtual worlds, and we've written extensively
about it. But the lessons we've learned go far beyond these.
Economies in Cyberspace
Economies exist everywhere in Cyberspace. These economies provide a
mechanism for the communities to flourish.
MUDs have two constrained resources: memory and compute cycles. The
memory problem is addressed using distribution units called "quota".
Quota allows MUD citizens to create objects and extend their virtual
world. A fixed amount of quota is allocated to each new citizen, usually
by a system administrator. Each object created by a participant consumes
some amount of quota, and when the preassigned amount of quota is
exhausted, the user must appeal to the administrator for more. This is
an economy, but a very socialist one. Several MUDs administratively
require that the person applying for more quota prove that their work is
deserving of consideration, perhaps meeting some theme-oriented or
social-improvement goal. Prove to the central government that you are
worthy, and you shall be granted the power to create. Citizens are
(usually) not free to trade quota with each other. In these systems, a
large amount of quota is a powerful status symbol.
Habitat has an internal economy, complete with play money called
"tokens". Citizens are granted tokens for connecting, and as prizes for
planned events. Tokens can be used to purchase items from vending
machines. These items can also later be recycled for somewhat fewer
tokens using pawn machines. But this interaction with machines isn't
really enough to establish the Token's real value. The most important
use of tokens in Habitat is for trade between players. Habitat customers
actually use tokens to gamble with each other, along with buying special
objects and publications (like poems and stories) from each other.
Unfortunately, the Habitat economy is inflationary, as tokens are added
to the system at a higher rate than they can be consumed by the supplied
machines. After a little while, everyone has all the objects they want.
Vending machines can make infinite numbers of the items on sale with no
production costs. As a result, there is a secondary economy in the
Habitats: heads.
In Habitat the primary way to change your appearance is by changing your
head. You can buy new styles of head from a vending machine in the local
"Head Shop", or you might win a unique head in a contest sponsored by
the service administrator. After a while, everyone has a copy of any
interesting but common head that may available from the vending
machines, and there is nothing left to buy except the special
one-of-a-kind prize heads. As a result, these rare heads trade for
hundreds of times the price of the others. Without a doubt, the dominant
symbol of wealth and stature in the Habitats is a large collection of
unique heads, proudly on display in your virtual living room.
Commerce for Cyberspace -- AMIX
The American Information Exchange (AMIX) is the first attempt at
bringing free markets to Cyberspace. Like Habitat, it has a client
interface that runs on popular PCs and connects to the host via packet
networks. What makes this service different is that it introduces a
currency to Cyberspace: the American dollar. AMIX is designed to
facilitate transactions of information, goods, and services /between
customers/. The service makes its money by taking a cut of each
transaction rather than by marking up connect time. Customers are free
to buy and sell with each other. Documents (actually, any collection of
bits) can be posted in the marketplace, each with its own description,
price and payment terms (including "Payment On Evaluation"). An
electronic mail system supports (and enforces) negotiations for online
consulting contracts. Customers can sell their expertise and talent to
each other.
AMIX is another persistent place, with the very desirable, but currently
unique, attribute of a functioning, convertible currency. You can buy
stuff from anyone else on the system at a mutually agreed price.
Customers who have a positive account balance at the end of each month
are actually mailed checks for that amount.
A real economy is probably the second most important feature required
for broad acceptance with the general public. After all, trillions of
dollars each year are already flowing through the global
telecommunications networks, with interbank transfers, credit card
validations, and other types of EFT transactions.
Electronic communities
We think that the most important feature of the future Global Cyberspace
network will be the sense of community. A sense of place requires not
only persistent locations to make it possible, and economic systems to
provide some means of determining the value of things in it, but
communities of people to give it life. People want to interact with
other people who are interested in the same things that they are.
Some examples of community from the Habitats:
Performing arts troupes formed spontaneously. In Club Caribe, they were
called "Wave Teams", and performed coordinated movement, gesturing, and
typing, to create a sort of slow-motion dance that looks very much like
cheerleading on Valium. (In those days connections were at 300 bps, much
slower than is typical today.) These teams had regular scheduled
practices and participated in monthly competitions judged by their
fellow citizens. All of this happened without any outside assistance
from service operators.
Back when Fujitsu Habitat had only 2,000 citizens, a bug in the teleport
system turned up. Since the 'port charged two tokens for a ride, if you
attempted to use it while holding only one token, it would give you back
-1 token as change. In the host this number was exactly the same as
65,535 tokens, a gigantic sum. Several players capitalized on the bug
before it was brought to the attention of the system administrators
(called Oracles), who corrected the programming error, but then had the
problem of all these tokens now in the economy. The topic of what to do
was hashed out on the Habitat bulletin boards for a week. In the end the
citizens /voluntarily/ returned over 250,000 tokens to the Oracles. The
Oracles arranged to have the entire amount redistributed equally to
everyone.
Communities must be able to grow and transform. Many emerging electronic
communities die for lack of the ability to adapt to change. Just as
companies and small organizations go through serious growth pains and
often disintegrate when they can't adapt, so too have early Cyberspace
colonies. This type of adapt-or-die transformation occurs eventually in
every growing virtual community we've experienced. A successful system
will plan for it. Plan for growth. Plan for change. Sense of place is
critical to the growth of community, as people adopt the emerging
culture as part of their own.
Looking forward
The coming consumer-oriented digital communication network will bring
about a new economic, technological, and social environment which will
ultimately touch every individual in the world.
Looking at the Cyberspace worlds described here, and the many others
that we've studied world-wide, one can begin to see the shape that this
emerging Global Cyberspace Infrastructure will take.
The issues
We've stated the importance of understanding that Cyberspace should be
about a sense of place, generated by computers but brought to life by
communities of human inhabitants. Given this assertion, how should we
proceed? How do we build a system where many-to-many is the basic model
of communication, and the one-to-one (telephone) and one-to-many
(television) modes are just special cases?
We propose that, broadly speaking, there are five technical and social
issues to be addressed: Decentralization, Commerce, Equipment, Network,
and Openness.
Decentralization
The network needs to be able to support the broadest possible range of
services. This goal cannot be achieved with a centralized system,
because a centralized system simply can't be scaled that large.
If we tried to put all possible useful services into a single
centralized facility, we would end up with a server too gigantic to be
practical and horrendous communications bottlenecks going into and out
of it that would swamp the fastest broadband network. Clearly, this is
unrealistic, which is why nobody does it this way. A distributed
approach, of course, is what all serious, real-world computer networks
employ, as does the telephone system itself. A distributed network
topology, such as the Internet's, is required for Cyberspace to scale
large enough to support everyone.
Beyond technological decentralization, however, we will also want to
have creative decentralization and entrepreneurial decentralization. By
this we mean that the network is an open system and the barriers to
entry are low, so that individuals, small organizations, and large
companies can all exist together in an open market, just as they do in
the "real" world. Allowing division of labor and the natural forces of
competition to come to bear on the services available in Cyberspace will
be a major advance over existing online services, which, with the
notable exception of the Internet, follow a centralized control and
planning model. Market forces will tend to make the services that are
available in Cyberspace attractive, easy to use, and well matched to the
needs of the customers.
The Internet, though, offers a useful case study of what happens when
there /is/ an open system with low barriers to entry: explosive growth
and a flourishing variety of services the likes of which the world has
never seen: millions of computers, ten to twenty million users,
countless resources and services offered, and all of this growing at a
rate of five to ten percent per month. The Internet may well become the
communications backbone of the Global Cyberspace Infrastructure that we
envision here. However, the Internet itself is ultimately /just/ a
communications backbone. Without additional protocol layers it lacks the
ability to be a true marketplace, for it lacks any general support for
that fundamental ingredient of market economics: money.
Commerce
So the second issue that the Global Cyberspace Infrastructure needs to
address is the addition of commerce. It /is/ now possible to do business
electronically through a variety of channels. However, all of these
channels require either an awkward out-of-band component (as with credit
card transactions, where the merchant must contact the bank separately
through some other means) or a pre-established business relationship
between the parties to the transaction (as with EDI or EFT, where the
transaction is backed by an elaborate set of contractual obligations as
well as MIS staffs at both ends to make sure everything works at the
technical level). However, the electronic environment currently has no
mechanism to support the model which is in some ways the most basic, the
way shops, vending machines, and mutual strangers of all sorts do
business every day, all over the world: in cash.
$
Cash, as a bearer instrument, solves a fundamental problem with
transactions between mutual strangers, namely that a buyer and a seller
don't necessarily have any a priori reason to trust each other. In the
electronic environment they might not even be able to identify each
other. If a trust relationship is required in order to do business, the
transaction cost of establishing it may be more than the transaction
itself is worth. However, since cash is, in a sense, self-validating,
the transaction cost of a cash transaction can be low.
The problem with electronic cash, of course, is that it is just patterns
of bits. These bits must be communicated over what is likely to be an
insecure channel, necessitating cryptographic protocols for
communications security. Furthermore, these bits can be copied by anyone
who has them, including those who might have them legitimately (and who
might legitimately want to make backup copies!), so making digital cash
proof against forgery and duplication is a significant technical
problem. Remarkably, cryptographic protocols to do this /do/ exist; at
least one these will have to be incorporated into the Cyberspace
protocol suite.
All of the digital cash mechanisms that we know of require the money to
flow in a loop of some sort. In order to be a credible medium of
exchange, the money must be issued by a stable, well known entity with a
sound reputation, such as a bank. The bank is one of the nodes through
which the communications flows as the operation of the electronic cash
protocols unfolds. Thus we can see that the development of Cyberspace
encompasses not merely the technical aspects but the institutional
infrastructure as well. In addition to supporting the monetary system,
the other traditional functions of banks -- holding deposits and making
loans -- will also continue to be important in the electronic
environment. Thus we can expect that the migration of the banking system
into Cyberspace will have to be an early development. Of course, banks
are already largely creatures of the electronic world, but not now in a
way that connects directly to the banking customer. There has been some
limited experimentation in this arena, but this has mostly been
concerned with automation of the conventional forms of retail bank usage
(e.g., access to checking account statements). As far as we have been
able to determine, there are currently no banks providing banking
services within the computer networks per se.
Equipment
Present day cyberspaces are delivered using personal computers, and we
expect this to continue. However, we also expect that broad acceptance
of the Global Cyberspace Infrastructure will require the invention of a
new device, which we, adopting telephone terminology, are tentatively
calling the Cyberspace Terminal.
Unlike computer terminals of the past, a Cyberspace Terminal will have
the capability of acting as both a client (consumer) and a server
(provider) on the Global Cyberspace network. It will supply the
potential for any user to offer services to anyone else.
It will combine the best features of telephones, televisions, and
computers. Like all digital appliances, it is, in fact, a computer, but
its personality will be completely different. In most ways it will be
more like a telephone than a computer or a television.
Like a telephone, it will be an instant-on device, be extremely
reliable, and have simple operation. No waiting for it to warm up or
bootstrap. It will always be ready to help in an emergency. Anyone who
can speak or push a few buttons will be able to operate it. It will
simply work.
It will also deliver high performance at low cost, as a result of both
the trajectory of electronics technology development and consumer market
pressures. And finally, it must be multimedia capable. It must handle
all the useful media formats of the future. This is particularly true of
high-quality motion picture compression, in whatever form this is
finally developed. Eventually it may even be portable and wireless.
Network
A critical component of the Global Cyberspace Infrastructure is of
course the network. International deployment of digital network
technology is already underway, but it is arriving in various formats,
with wildly varying bandwidth and cost. So the question arises: Is there
a minimum bandwidth or specific data format required for Cyberspace?
There are services which can operate adequately today using modems and
dial-up analog connections. Habitat is an example of such a service.
There are other services which are offered today, but are not really
useful in their current form, and will require greater bandwidth in
order to be truly viable. Electronic catalog shopping, for example, is a
service that may be significantly improved by wide-spread deployment of
narrowband ISDN.
There are other services, such as delivery of video, which will require
broadband ISDN, and we can speculate that in the future we will invent
new services requiring even greater bandwidth.
The amount of bandwidth required for the Global Cyberspace
Infrastructure is determined by the services to be offered rather than
being some fundamental property of the medium itself. There are a few
services which work adequately on analog lines with modems, some which
require N-ISDN, and others which require B-ISDN.
The Global Cyberspace Infrastructure itself is independent of these
pipeline issues. The more bandwidth available, the greater the range of
services that can be provided. It should gracefully adapt and scale to
the increased capabilities of improved networking technologies.
The Global Cyberspace Infrastructure can be built on top of any network,
so long as it can, with some degree of reliability, send packets of bits
there and back again.
Openness
The decentralization of Global Cyberspace refers to more than just
distribution of host processing. It also applies to its development and
the services themselves.
Cyberspace will be /big/, and, as such, must be an open system. No one
institution, company, government or other entity can, or should, own it
all. By necessity it must be an open environment with open standards.
The recent rash of mega-mergers and strategic alliances by cable,
television, movie, telephone and computer companies are all driven by
doomed visions of the future of multimedia telecommunications, visions
of centralized power rooted in a world of publishing and broadcasting
whose business model is wildly inappropriate for Cyberspace. They are
all floundering in the resulting confusion.
If open, Global Cyberspace will provide a robust infrastructure which
can support any number of services, each connecting to the network
whenever and wherever convenient. Likely services would, of course,
include the expected range of services, such as entertainment systems
like Habitat, various forms of home shopping, education, government
services, and movie libraries.
However, anyone with a host computer, a telephone connection, and an
electronic bank account should be able to launch a service. These
services can vary wildly in the products they deliver, the customers
they are targeting, their pricing policies, and their presentation and
interface conventions. Some services will be adaptations of existing
services. Others will be new inventions that we scarcely imagine today,
businesses that could only exist in Cyberspace. These services will come
in all shapes and sizes. They will all exist together in an electronic
marketplace. By providing this marketplace with Habitat-style social
interaction, we do more than just link machines together. We also link
people together.
Conclusion
Our experiences show us that the many-to-many communications model
currently provided by online services is more flexible than others
proposed, and is what the consumers want. When AT&T did a trial of
data-highway applications, people wanted to communicate and play simple
games with each other more than any other activity. They followed up
these conclusions by investing millions to purchase 20% of the
ImagiNation Network, a games-oriented online services company.
The Habitat and AMIX projects mapped some new cyberspace territory, in
the areas of interface, community and commerce. The lessons we learned
from building them point to a design for an emerging Global Cyberspace
Infrastructure based on the ideals of Decentralization, Security, and
Community.
While the big players in the field are spending billions deploying
fiber-optic cable, purchasing media conglomerates, and making slick
science-fiction television commercials, we think they are missing a
couple of the key components of Cyberspace. The winning design isn't
just about slapping together some hardware, content, and packaging. One
of the missing components is flexibility. This flexibility will be
embodied in a Cyberspace Operating System, a suite of secure protocols
designed to support a fully distributed network of interactive services.
Our company is leading an open-systems effort for the design and
implementation of these protocols. The other missing component is
people. Cyberspace will be ultimately many-to-many, and services of all
shapes and sizes will be provided for, and by, the communities that
inhabit it.
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