Multi-Choice Chatting In Virtual Worlds
There's a fascinating post on the Habitat Chronicles, the blog of virtual world pioneers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer (creators of the '80s LucasArts virtual world), which discusses context-sensitive fixed word chatting in virtual worlds, as currently used in Toontown for Disney to avoid unfortunate 'To Catch A Predator' situations.
They relate an attempted project for Disney in the '90s: "We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words - the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world... We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he'd created the following sentence: I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.""
But they go on to discuss convoluted ways around the fact that you need a 'secret friends code' to directly talk to people you meet in-world: "Another way to make secret friends with toons you don't know is to form letters/numbers with the picture frames in your house. Around you may see toons who have alot of picture frames at their toon estates, they are usually looking for secret friends." Then they arrange the pictures to make letters and... wow.
Comments
Nice to hear from Farmer and Morningstar again, and to hear that Vaz is still alive. It has been ages since I've heard they've done anything, and Second Life gets so much hype lately it's like people have completely forgotten, if they even knew to begin with, that there once was those ancient things called Habitat and Club Caribe.
Back in my WorldsAway days I played around with a language obstructor another user made for me. We managed to turn it into a group in the Jungle area there that played at being natives, using the decoder program to turn our words into a cypher that only other natives (that is, people with the program) could understand. But we had worked it out that it wasn't -impossible- for others to understand us, they just had to work out the code, which was a word-by-word kind of cipher.
That was different from this, of course, in that everyone who played along wanted it to succeed, and the obfuscation was really a kind of puzzle for other users to overcome, and wasn't intended to be an uncrackable code at all.
One thing about this post, however, that's very disheartening is hearing the words "friend codes" bandied about regarding Toontown. Uh-oh. Could it be that Nintendo got the idea for their annoying code system, ultimately, from Farmer and Morningstar?
Posted by: John H. | March 4, 2007 11:51 AM