moo | Jennifer Kramer

Thoughts on Digitally Native Artisanal Artifacts

Tucked away in a corner of a bustling storage depot in the halo of the San Francisco bay area is a metal shipping container. Nestled inside that container, surrounded by the furnishings and bric-a-brac of a contemporary urban life, is a small, silver figure. It is the only one of its kind in the world. It is the result of a nearly 20 year design process, distilled through three minds from a short collection of descriptive words. It is also the future.

A Little Backstory

It’s good to have friends who understand you. I like to try things. I like to pick up new technologies and roll them around, get a feel for their heft and texture. This often involves doing a project, but these projects can sometimes be a little weird. Finding good natured co-conspirators really helps.

For the last few years, Matt Sanders has been my target guinea pig. Matt is perfect, because we’ve diverged paths enough he doesn’t know everything I’m up to. However, we spent years in the trenches together, so I know him pretty well. If we saw each other all the time there might be an obligation tied to the things I come up with, and that would make it weird. Matt also happens to enjoy the artistic and technological, so I know the fundamental concept of the attempt will be appreciated.

In 2010, I got Matt a rap song for his birthday. DJ Brixx, a friend I met through an electronics comparison shopping project wrote and recorded it. Brixx lives in the Philippines, and once professed a desire to eat at the Cracker Barrel. He’s a crazy guy. You meet crazy people by trying to do crazy things and finding the people who are willing to go along for the ride.

Ideas

The rap song set a high bar, but sometime in 2011 I was driving up Loop 1 with Irma, and realized that I could top it by making the virtual real. I could create a small figure of one of his RPG characters. Years ago, starting in 1994, Matt and I spent a lot of time together in an Internet-based text-based role playing game called Ghostwheel. I’ve talked about it a couple of times before. In Ghostwheel you describe yourself, what your character looks like, and what it’s carrying. I had been looking into creating 3D models of the Dust Bunnies characters, and knew that there were freelance 3D modelers out there who were experienced at character design. Shapeways let you print things in metals, including a very nice sterling silver. So the pieces were there, I just needed to get it done.

Production

I ended up working with a 3D modeler named Bhaskar Rac. He had worked at a video games studio, and had a good feel for character design. We did a contract through oDesk, which handles payment and taxes and whatnot. I sent Bhaskar Matt’s character’s description, some photos of him for general reference, and some sample pictures of the things he had on his person.

After a few days of discussions about Fallout and thematic inspiration, Bhaskar sent back this sketch. A few days after that he followed up with a draft 3D model. I thought it was awesome, so we tweaked a few small details, and I uploaded it to Shapeways New York manufacturing facility.

Shapeways prints their sterling silver models in a three step process. First they print the model in wax using a high resolution 3D printer. Then they submerge the wax model in liquid plaster to make a mold. The wax is melted out and molten silver is poured in, resulting in the final piece. It produces a very high level detail, and is a process often used for jewelry. It also works really well for anything small you intend to last for a long, long time.

A few weeks later, this appeared in the mail:

Reflections

The little 2 inch high figure is now in transit with the rest of Matt’s stuff as he moves to San Francisco. The digital model exists, but no other physical traces grace the earth. There is only one. Unless Bhaskar sketched out something on paper, it’s the only physical manifestation of this entire project. That’s a pretty weird thing.

If Matt were to somehow lose the figure, if someone broke into his house or if there was a fire, or someone unleashed a bio-engineered virus that only ate silver, we could print another one. As part of the “gift” I sent him the 3D file, so if he wanted he could populate his house with tiny Matt figures in every size and color. He could open source it, upload it to Shapeways and let anyone print a tiny Matt figure for their Monopoly set. It’s a present that comes with it’s own infinite digital reconstruction blueprint.

But what if someone stole the digital one? What if it leaked out, and people liked it so much they started printing their own? How would that make Matt feel? How would it make me feel? Does he have “the original” even though there is no original? Is it a “first” like a blog comment? Is there still something unique about the one that arrived in his house packed in a tiny little box for his birthday in 2011? I think so, but it lives in a weird space.

Implications

I think this kind of gift, the present deeply rooted in the past, in a shared history and experience, but interpreted by skilled artisans into something new, is going to be the new normal. While hiring artists and 3D modelers is challenging now, there’s nothing stopping someone from creating Photoshop or Maya as a service. Perhaps Shapeways will even evolve in that direction. Supply the talent, ship the product.

We’re surrounded by mass market objects. Books, movies, furniture, even sometimes what we consider to be art. We collect it and we arrange it, but it isn’t truly unique. The hand blown glasses at Ikea say they’re made by hand and each is unique, but you’re buying them from Ikea, so the really weird ones probably get tossed in the recycling heap. Sometimes we may shop at craft fairs, but even crafters will reproduce an item if it sells. It’s hard to create things from scratch, and producing one-offs is expensive in a traditional model.

But now that the means of production are so cheap, and the training to use them is largely free and open, we can truly have unique things without spending a lot of money. We can create home movies that are beautiful, we can hire artists to create beautiful things just for us or the ones we care about.

It’s possible we’re just setting ourselves up for a backlash. The figure I made for Matt isn’t a Warhol, and while we both get it and enjoy it, I’m sure some would argue that we’d be better off with a good reproduction of something truly important instead of a meta-reference. But Warhols are meta-references, so maybe we’re just becoming hyper-personal with them. In the end that’s what we get to weigh. Is the quality of the work more important, or the personal connection you have to it?

VallisMOO: A Game Designer Is You!

The world is a scarred shell of wind and sand and heat. Whoever had their finger on the button finally pressed it. There’s only one safe place left, a tiny, sheltered valley between two giant mountains. To the south is the ocean, to the north, the wasteland. A magical gate keeps the monsters out, and keeps the valley safe. We live well here, in our little sea side town or deep in the forest. We roam the grassy plains, dotted with bald hills. We hunt, and forage, and build. Sometimes we fight, because what’s worth fighting for more than the last good place on Earth?

YOU & Me

A couple of days ago I read a review of Austin Grossman‘s new book, YOU, by Cory Doctorow, and decided to buy a copy. Austin’s a game designer, and he’s worked on System Shock, Clive Barker’s Undying, Deus Ex, and Dishonored. He’s now an author, with his first book SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE, and now YOU. YOU is a book about a directionless 27 year old who gets a job at a game company started by some of his high school friends. While designing a new role playing game, he delves into the mystery of what happened to his friends and their dream of the ultimate game. A game where you could be and do anything, and the story would unfold before you naturally.

I haven’t finished YOU, but it’s been bringing up all kinds of memories. I got my first internet account in early 1994, dialing up through Real/Time Communications in Austin. R/T hosted a game, a text-based Zork-ish virtual world game called Ghostwheel, or GhostMOO. I’ve talked about GhostMOO before in my Pocket Worlds post, but I had forgotten an interesting chunk of GhostMOO history, and my own stab at multiplayer game design. My own dream of the Ultimate Game.

Ghost^2

In 1997 GhostMOO was on the decline. We’d had a big rush of users in 1995, but many of them had graduated from college, and user numbers were down. The two main drivers of the game, Quinn (lead programmer) and Razorhawk (content creator) were busy with other projects, and without strong direction, GhostMOO was stagnating.

A couple of GhostMOO programmers, including Matt Sanders (who I’d go on to start Polycot and then join HP Cloud with) and I decided we’d start a spin off. Quinn had been gracious enough to release the core of the game, the bits and pieces that made up combat and non-player characters and monsters, out into the open as the GhostCore, so we had a good place to start.

We were thinking of creating a Ghost^2 or Ghostwheel 2.0, if you will. Similar core concepts, but different execution. Ghostwheel was all over the place thematically, we had monsters cribbed from Princess Bride, Alien, a whole community of Dragons straight out of Pern, a quaint japanese island, basically whatever a programmer was really into, they built. Even the name was cribbed from Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. In retrospect what we had was a mashup, we were just ahead of our time. Ghost^2 was an attempt to wipe the slate clean, to start with a core concept and theme that would be internally consistent.

Like all groups starting with a blank sheet of paper, we wanted to create the Ultimate Game, and we had the audacity to think that we could create a better game than the ones that had come before. We wanted to create a game where if you wanted to play a blacksmith, you should be able to do that all day, role play with other people, and generally succeed and feel progress. If you wanted to fight monsters, great, but that wasn’t the only path. Years later the first Star Wars Galaxies game would do this in MMORPG form, only to be neutered and turned into more of a combat grind in an attempt to compete with WoW.

Terrain Zones

One of the really interesting things that Quinn built at GhostMOO was the Terrain Room. GhostMOO was a MOO, a text based game, kind of like a multi-player Zork. In a game like this as you walk around you’re presented with room descriptions, which include the objects in the room (furniture, people, monsters, etc) and the available exits. Like so:

The R/T Round Room
Eight walls for each point of the compass, each with an open doorway.  The
 floor is tiled with checkered perma-linoleum; little matching octagons.

                    N   
        NW        Lounge       NE
      Austin        |       Hot Tub             UP
             \      |     /                     Helipad-
               \        /                         Austin
    W              YOU             E              Jizo Island
 Library -----     ARE   ----- Infirmary          Ghostwheel Plain
                  HERE
               /   |    \                       DOWN
        SW   /     |      \    SE               Ground floor-
     Obsidian               Greenroom             Exit to Wasteland    
                   S                               Guest Chamber
            PX/General Store
The center desk is empty of all personnel.  Someone must be on an extended
 coffee break.  An electronic sign-in pad is bolted to the desk.  A monitor is
 bolted into the desk.  Nobody's sitting on the floor.  Alongside the east
 wall is a queer little potted tree, a tallish leafy husk with a, uh, snout?
Contents:
 Bulletin board                                             
Obvious exits include down (d, trapdoor) and Up (Helipad, u).

Each of these rooms is dug by a programmer from an existing room, like mining through the digital aether. That new room then has an exit back to the room you were in before. (Here’s a map of the main house and grounds of LambdaMOO, for comparison.) That style of design makes for very detailed, interesting areas, but the overall area tends to be small, because every room needs to be described individually.

Quinn created something called a Terrain Room, which lived inside a Terrain Zone. In a Terrain Zone you insert a little ASCII map, something like this:

        @qedit me.tmp
        # ############
        #    # #     #
        ###~~#~#~~~#~#
        #          # #
        ############ #
                     #
        ##############
        .

This map defines what kind of rooms there are and what the layout is. In this case the pound signs (#) may be walls, while the tildes (~) may be rivers, and the blank spaces grassy fields. With this lovely hack Quinn transformed the Zork style MOO into a player-perspective Rogue-like.

The cool feature of the Terrain Zone is that it only creates the rooms if they need to exist. In a MOO everything takes up memory space, and back in the mid 90’s memory wasn’t as plentiful as it is now. If you’re standing in a terrain room, the terrain zone can look at the rooms around you on the map, and tell you what’s there. “To the north, east and west are open fields. To the south is a stone wall.” Those rooms don’t actually exist. Once you decide to walk north, the Terrain Zone creates that room, moves you into it, and destroys the room you were standing in before (unless you dropped something, or there’s some other reason for the room to still exist).

By operating like this you could create huge areas without actually digging and describing every room yourself, and the memory consumption would be a lot smaller. Your monsters and other non-player characters could also know about their “home” terrain type, so they wouldn’t stray from the grass or river. You could also let the player “travel north” and they would keep walking through rooms until they hit a room that was different than the type they were already in, or contained something unique.

In Ghost^2, we decided to use a Terrain Zone for our world, since it let us create an overall map that had consistent distances and spacing. I sketched the map out on a sheet of paper (above), and then started drawing it in a paint program on my Mac (below). I had a program that let me convert graphical images into ASCII art, so I was able to go from a map directly into the MOO. This is the last version of the Ghost^2 map, created in October of 1998:

The map is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, so our game would would be 1,000 rooms by 1,000 rooms. In the orange spots where there were towns we could dig out special rooms for houses and buildings, we could dig out special dungeons from the fields or forests. In this map light green is grassland, dark green is forest, gray-green is hills, blue is water, yellow is roads, and grey is rocky terrain. The outlines around large sections are edge types, like the edge of a forest, a beach or the base of a hill.

It was a really cool concept, and thinking about it still gets me excited. The idea of adventuring in that world, exploring the bustling cities, verdant fields, dark forests and dimly lit caves sounds like a lot of fun.

VallisMOO

Game design isn’t easy. It’s easy to dream about, but it’s hard in practice. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through YOU, and the main character’s starting to realize that he has to enumerate every kind of object in the world, in every state it has. We reached a similar place with Ghost^2, which eventually became VallisMOO when interest waned among the other developers. We decided not to create a sister-MOO to Ghostwheel and I kept working on my own, and that MOO became VallisMOO.

I appreciate the stamina exhibited by the Adams brothers, the team behind Dwarf Fortress. They’ve been working on that thing for years, but that level of dedication is really hard to maintain. I got to a place with VallisMOO where I needed to begin populating the combat system with weapons. I heard that Steve Jackson games was working on a Low-Tech book, due out “any day now”, and instead of forging ahead (ahem) and making do, I decided to wait till it came out, and use it for reference. That was 1998. GURPS Low-Tech finally shipped in 2002, and by then I was on to real paying projects and VallisMOO was only a memory.

Legacy

I went digging through my project archive and found a directory full of VallisMOO code and to-do lists and graphics. It even had some logs of conversations where I discussed the ideas for Ghost^2 with some friends, things I’d long forgotten.

I thought I’d share the design documents with the world, so I’ve uploaded them to github with a Creative Commons license. There are files of character types, races, locations, maps and all kinds of crazy things.

If you thought this post was interesting, and enjoy 90’s era game design, you’ll probably really like Austin Grossman‘s YOU. I finished it last night, and once I get a chance, I’ll write a more complete review.

Platform Persistence, Virtual Death and Pocket Worlds

Note: This is a long, rambling, train of thought post. The tl;dr version is: Emotional connection to bots happens, we get sad when things we care for go away, so there’s a big ethical risk associated with human-acting bots living in unportable platforms. We members of the ‘Bot 2.0’ community need to address this before we get too far.

A little over a year ago I started playing a cloud-based iPhone game called GodVille. GodVille describes itself as a Zero Player Game. You take the role of a god, you create a hero, and you send that hero out into the game world to fight on your behalf. Your hero is an independent being. When you come back to check on them, they will have recorded an entertaining diary of monsters fought, treasures collected, and items sold, all without your input. You only have four influence options on your hero: you can encourage them, which makes them heal faster, discourage them, which makes them fight better, shout down at them, and activate some of the items they pick up.

While it isn’t a very interactive game, it’s still a compelling experience. I check on my hero every day or two, look for interesting items to activate, and encourage him as much as I can.

Your GodVille hero can’t permanently die. They can be killed, but they’ll just wait around in the ground, writing notes in their diary until you resurrect them. (They’ll get tired of waiting for you and dig themselves out after a few days.) Not killing these bot-like characters is common in online games, permanent death is generally reserved for the hardcore modes of single player releases. (A really interesting article in wired.co.uk postulates that the free to play model is driving this, because developers don’t want to give you an excuse to walk away from their microtransactions, or get the feeling that your money was wasted.)

Once sufficiently powerful, your GodVille hero can adopt a pet, it’s own sub-bot that helps it fight and gains it’s own levels. My hero adopted a pet earlier this year. Over the a few weeks I watched the pet (a dust bunny named Felix) fight along side my hero, shield him from attacks and help heal him. The pet went up in level, gained some abilities, and everything was going just peachy.

Then I opened the app one day, and the pet was dead. My hero was carrying around Felix’s corpse. I went to the web and searched for pet resurrection, but found it wasn’t possible. Sometimes the hero will pay to have the pet resurrected, sometimes they’ll just bury them. After a grieving period, they’ll adopt a new one.

Felix’s death had a lot more of an emotional impact on me than I expected. I didn’t know Felix, I never met it, it really only existed as a few hundred bytes of data on a server somewhere. I’ve had more interactions with lamps in my house than I did with Felix. If you tip a lamp I really like off a table and shatter it into a million pieces, I may be angry, but I likely won’t feel an immediate emotional loss.

A Lamp with Feelings

Felix’s death was hard because I’d made an emotional connection to him, watching him interact with my hero. His death highlighted my powerlessness in the game. I can resurrect my hero, within the confines of the game mechanic, but I can’t resurrect his pet. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I can’t bring Felix back to life.

Someday, inevitably, GodVille will shut down. People will move on to other projects, the server bill won’t get paid, iPhone apps won’t be the hot thing anymore. My hero, his diary and pet will disappear, and because he only lives inside the GodVille system (and being part of that system is a fundamental aspect of who he is), he will be gone forever.

Bruce Sterling talk at SXSW 2010 | Flickr - Photo Sharing! — Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2010 (photo by jonl)

Bruce Sterling gave a great talk about this at SXSW in 2010, about how the Internet doesn’t take care of it’s creations. We build and throw away. Startups form, grow like crazy, and if they don’t sufficiently hockey stick, they close. Or they get popular but not popular enough, and the team gets hired away to bigger players. Either way, the service shutters, the content and context disappears, history is lost. If it’s bad to have this happen to your restaurant checkins and photos, how much worse is it when it happens to virtual beings you’ve created an emotional attachment to? As creators, if we encourage platforms like this, roach motels where content comes in and never comes out, what does that say about us?

Eighteen and a half years ago I created my first character on a text based multiplayer internet game called Ghostwheel, hosted by my first ISP, Real/Time Communications. Ghostwheel was a MOO, an Object Oriented version of a Multi-User Dungeon, the progenitor of today’s MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. In a MOO you can create characters, build environments and objects, talk to other people, fight, and even create bots.

Real/Time Communications hosted Ghostwheel on a small server in their data center, a 486 desktop machine. People from all over the world connected to that server, created characters, and wove shared stories together over the early boom years of the internet.

Early Ghostwheel Meetup — A Late 90’s Austin Ghostwheel Austin Meetup

Eventually Real/Time Communications lost interest in hosting and maintaining Ghostwheel (and eventually Real/Time itself disappeared), so we took it elsewhere. As someone with colocated servers and ISP experience, I ended up hosting it on one of my machines. It now lives in a cloud VM, and even though the players have left for newer, more exciting destinations, everything they created, the characters, the setting, the dusty echoes of romances and feuds and plots all still exist. It still exists because someone with the wherewithal got their hands on it, and cared enough about it to keep it going, and it exists because MOO is an open source platform that doesn’t depend on one company being in business.

While piecing together the thoughts for this post it occurred to me the that the MOO server could probably be compiled on some modern linux based smartphone. They have more than enough CPU power and memory, and even a 3G connection is fine for text. I could conceivably load Ghostwheel on one and carry it around in my pocket. A whole world, nearly a thousand characters, tens of thousands of rooms and objects, dozens and dozens of species of monsters, all living in my pocket. I could hand it to people and ask them about the weight of a world. Every time I think about that it blows my mind. There’s definitely the kernel of something new and weird there.

So back to my point, as I’ve talked about before there’s a whole species of autonomous bots appearing around us that we relate to as nearly human. Like my GodVille character, we don’t have direct control over them, their autonomy being one of the things that makes them seem more human. They’re coming, they’re awesome, and I think in a few years they’ll be as common as Facebook accounts.

The most exciting work I’ve seen in this field is from the good folks at Philter Phactory and their Weavrs system. Weavrs are social bots defined by location, work and play interests, and groups of emotional tags. The Weavrs system hooks into Twitter, generates its own personal web pages (kind of like a bot-only mini-Tumblr) for each weavr, and is extensible through API driven modules called prosthetics. Some example prosthetics include the dreams prosthetic, which folds images the weavr has reposted into strange, creepy kaleidoscopes.

Weavrs are easy to create, they produce some compelling content, and they’re fun to watch. I’ve created a few, my wife has one, several of my friends have them. Interest is picking up from marketing and branding agencies, and where the cool hunters go, tech interests will inevitably follow.

The thing that’s starting to concern me is the possibility that Bots 2.0 could end up being another field like social networking where the hosted model gets out ahead of ownership and portability. What happens when the service hosting our bots disappears? What happens to all it’s posts, it’s images, it’s conversations? (I suppose I wouldn’t be qualified to work at a cloud provider if I didn’t have strong feeling about data portability.)

Weavrs as a whole isn’t open source, but it has lots of open source bits. Philter Phactory is trying to run a business, and I don’t begrudge them that. They have the first mover advantage in a field that’s going to be huge. I’m sure data portability is on their radar, but it’s a lot easier to prototype and build a service when you’re the only one running it. Conversely, it’s a lot easier to scale out a platform designed to be run stand-alone than to create a stand-alone version of a platform.

Once a few more folks start to realize how interesting and useful these things are, I think we’re going to see a Cambrian Explosion of social bots, and I’m sure plenty of entrants in the field won’t be thinking in terms of portability. They’ll be thinking about the ease of centralized deployment and management, and the reams of juicy data they can mine out of these things.

I remember in the early 2000’s feeling a similar excitement about self publishing (blogging). It was obviously going to be something that was going to be around forever once it was perfected. You could see the power in it’s first fits and starts, and it was just going to keep getting better. I think there are more than superficial similarities between self publishing platforms and social bot platforms, in fact.

Thinking back on that evolution, I think the archetype that we should hope for would be the WordPress model. I remember Matt Mullenweg visiting the Polycot offices in 2004 or so. He was passionate, had a great project on his hands, and I’m embarrassed to say that we weren’t smart enough to figure out a way to help him with it. Matt, Automattic and the WordPress community have done a great job of managing the vendor lockin problem while still providing a great hosted service people are willing to pay for. They get the best of both worlds, the custom WordPress sites and associated developer community, millions of blogs hosted by ISPs, the plugin developers, and still get to run a nicely profitable, extremely popular managed service. If wordpress.com goes away (god forbid), someone will still be maintaining the core codebase, and you’ll be able to export your data and run your own instance as long as you like. (Just remember to register your own domain name.)

I hope that the social bot community evolves something similar. I think that platforms are coming online to encourage that, and I think the people in the field are smart and recognize the ethical implications. Maybe in a year you’ll be able to run your bots on a hosted service or, if you’re motivated, run your own bot server and fiddle with it’s innards as you please. Who knows, you may even run them on your smartphone.