Habitat Chronicles: You can't tell people anything
Habitat Chronicles
Cyberspace. Virtual communities. Online games. Distributed systems.<br>Opinion, history, advice, and silliness from two guys who've been building this stuff for a long, long time.
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In 1985 we began work on what would become one of the world's first<br>multi-person graphical virtual worlds, and arguably the first of what are<br>now awkwardly called "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games"<br>(MMORPGs). Thus began a series of adventures in technology, business, and<br>the online world which continue to this day. This site is where we tell<br>our story: the things we learned, the mistakes we made, the people we met,<br>a tale of human brilliance and folly and things you would never have<br>imagined.
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April 22, 2004
You can't tell people anything
This is sort of Morningstar’s version of Murphy’s Law.
When we were assembling our catalog of the things we had learned over the past decade and a half in this business, we almost didn’t include this one because it seems so banal. But I keep finding that it’s often the first thing I say when people ask me what about my experiences (and another thing I’ve learned is to pay attention to things I find myself saying; that way I’ll know what I really think). And, upon reflection, I think it’s actually one of the more important lessons that we’ve learned.
We all spend a lot of our time talking to bosses or investors or marketing people or press or friends or other developers. I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. People will often think they understand, and they’ll say they understand, but then their actions show that it just ain’t so.
Years ago, before Lucasfilm, I worked for Project Xanadu (the original hypertext project, way before this newfangled World Wide Web thing). One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. We provided lots of explanation. We had pictures. We had scenarios, little stories that told what it would be like. People would ask astonishing questions, like "who’s going to pay to make all those links?" or "why would anyone want to put documents online?" Alas, many things really must be experienced to be understood. We didn’t have much of an experience to deliver to them though — after all, the whole point of all this evangelizing was to get people to give us money to pay for developing the software in the first place! But someone who’s spent even 10 minutes using the Web would never think to ask some of the questions we got asked.
In 1988 we began consulting to Fujitsu, when they licensed Habitat from Lucasfilm to create Fujitsu Habitat in Japan. We started out with a week long seminar at Skywalker Ranch for their team, explaining everything we knew about Habitat. We gave them copious documentation and complete source code listings. Following that, for the next couple of years they had unlimited access to us via fax, phone and email to answer any questions they might have. We made several visits to Japan to advise them. On our visits they often asked questions that seemed a little, well, odd. We chalked it up to the language barrier, but still, there were clearly things they...