Chip Morningstar Interview: How the Metaverse Started with Habitat

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The metaverse is all the rage today, and its lineage goes back a long way in video games. The universe of connected virtual worlds could well become a trillion-dollar reality, and it might be worth thinking about where it all came from.

The ideas were developed in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. But games played an important role in moving the idea of ​​the metaverse from the realm of science fiction to everyday entertainment as well. It's easy to think back to the influence of massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or virtual worlds like Second Life.

But these worlds owe many of their features to Habitat, an online world released by Lucasfilm in 1986. If you remember Habitat, then you really are an OG. I came across a collection of Habitat materials in 2020 when I visited the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) in Oakland, CA. Habitat was created by game developers Randy Farmer, Janet Hunter, Aric Wilmunder and Chip Morningstar.

It was the first real effort to create a large-scale commercial virtual community. Habitat was a graphical MUD, or multi-user dungeon, and was the precursor to modern online communities. It had a short life on the Quantum Link online service for the Commodore 64 computer. Farmer and Morningstar were honored for their efforts with a First Penguin Award at the 2001 Game Developers Choice Awards for their innovations with Habitat. /p> Event

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"Habitat continues to be the most significant example of preserving MMO history at an institutional level," said Alex Handy, former executive director of MADE, which is reopening in a new location after the pandemic has caused a move.< /p>

He added, "Habitat taught Chip and Randy a ton about online social interactions in virtual worlds. He taught them about distributed programming, event-driven programming, and object-oriented programming. Habitat presented the model that has become the basic lesson of online social media: people can be really mean, and if they can break things, they always will."

I sat down with Morningstar to talk about Habitat, the Metaverse, and blockchain technology. Morningstar is a software engineer at Agoric, which is a platform using Javascript-based smart contracts to quickly build and deploy decentralized finance applications.

And it still follows all the modern advancements in MMOs, metaverse ethics, humanism and technology, and blockchain games. We had an interesting conversation that spanned decades of technology.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview....