 Everquest |
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History of internet as a community experience. Online 'worlds'.
Online gaming
Communal databases
Usenet (alt.binaries.)
Imdb
Dmoz
Distributed Computing
Seti at home
Oxford cancer project
Pier to Pier – distributed collective
Completely decentralized.
Today talking about the collective, collective intelligence and community behaviors on the internet.
The web has reached a critical mass of users and critical volume of traffic where it has started to achieve its own identity, behaviors and traits. These behaviors emerge out of the collective actions and all the users as well as the software and hardware configurations that make up the online environment. Going to be talking about some of these things today.
ONLINE SOCIETY/COMMUNITY
Everquest the largest online gaming community. 114th largest GNP if it was a country.
 Everquest
Average age 25.7
23 hours a week on average.
They know they are 'role-playing' but still feel soem sense of realism. Compete with real-life (or what online users refer to as RL).
51 % of females and 46% of males said their online friends were as good as real-life friends
24% said they would be hurt if their partner role-played a romantic relatinoship online.
History
 ARPAnet
 PDP-10
DEC PDP. Birth of internet. Experimental Packet Switch System (EPSS). Allowed universities to connect to ARPAnet.
Set up online game servers. ADVENT (6 letter limitations)
 ZORK
MUDs were born of the technology avaialble at the time.
- PDP-10s. Processing power of 1/15th what a desktop machine currently has, but able ot support up to 250 simultaneous users (a tremendous task for a desktop still).
- Birth of EPSS/Internet Experimental Packet-Switching System
- Advanced Dugeons and Dragons
 Telnet experience
Shared text environments. Still immensely popular for the same reason that books have not been wiped out by movies. Rendering/Visualization power of mind
Telnet based. No real client, just connect to server. Client just needs to display text. Biased descriptive environments.
Began in 1979. Roy Trubshaw. Created a program called MUD, Multi-User Dungen
Richard Bartle. RPG, run around and kill each other. Go from forest to castle
Immensely popular. Sharing experience online. Birth of a lot of the issues on online identity. Concept of Online Representations.
Online representations or as they were dubbed avatars. Exploit the schism between online and offline identity.
 Outlook
The ease with which you can switch online identities William mitchell
"Avatars".
'physical representation'
Oddworlds Avatars
idealized self. or expression of alternate self.
Affords a schizogenesis of online identity. allows for your identity to fray into multiple strands.
 Everquest
The Norrathian Scrolls
Mediated experience. Online identity is established through a history of interactions, assocciated with a 'login' or 'character' but that mantle of identity is portable and does not actually equate to a real person.
50% of males have a charactre of opposite gender, 23% females
The only way to really establish 'identity' is through accountability. This is done through user histories. In early MUD's you Could log on, collect "points" and log off. Come back and be the same person with more points. Reinforces continuity of personality.
History is different because it can be more easily explicity tracked, thus linked to your identity. Also, just like yoru identity can be shed, it can be easily lost by assuming an entirely new mantel.
Identity is transferrable marketable.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2008866704
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2008606905
Since UNIX was developing at the same time there are a lot of idiosyncracies to user login/user accounts that I think are related to this.
telnet::brooklyn - finger
As online gaming advanced from MUDs and Zork, it did not really begin to foster online societies competitive with current society until the introductino of the MOO. Zork/MUDS were not Nnt really online society/community, Just Chat with violence.
1988 John Crane created "The Playground"
Big shift. Allows users to create "rooms" in MUD.
1989. TinyMUD
TINYMUD MAPS
Introduction of MOOs. Added Object Oriented programming model to MUDs, made them a little more advanced. Users could created objects, rooms and other things with more complex attributes. ***Shift away from battling/gaming to world building***
Fostered "society" and community. These things have lasted 10 years and the users have homesteaded and established an identity and home online. Log in regularly and see what is happening each day. Feel a sense of ownership.
LambdaMOO (1990) at Xerox Parc.
Same as other MUDs, but after a few years an important thing happened. The "wizards" stepped down, no longer a technocracy.
Wizards are people that have access to the inner workings of the system and can bypass the rules. Each MUD has rules that dictate behavior much like environmental contraints of RL, like gravity. Rules such as you can't see in a room with the lights off etc. Wizards do not have this, they also have the ability to ban users from the MUD.
Wizards stepped down and gave control to the users. Became self-governing. (Readings)
 Ultima Online
This is continuing to more advanced 3d Games such as Ultima Online. Have made new worlds that are just for socializing and not battling/killing.
Notion of collective building has made its way into all types of online experiences
http://www.activeworlds.com/tour.asp#explore
Community databases.
Usenet (alt.binaries.)
Take methodology of massive distributed processing power and mix it with collective/community behavior of online users. Emergent behavior
-Unix User Network in 1979
-Discussion groups/mailing lists. No real central location per-se, at least not for archiving.
Imdb
People apply for editorship and then manage an area. 35,611 editors
Have had some trouble because the editor of a cateory, say "Movies" gets overwhelmed
DMOZ
Other sites have introduced mechanisms that allow self-governance. Much in the way the MUDs/MOOs evolved from having elite group of creators manage a site to being democratic/socialistic
ZEAL
Any user can rate and suggest. If you suggest/rate and other people agree your value becomse higher. Self regulating
Open source movement
Encoding the distributed behavior into a viral copyright agreement.
Linux
1985 GNU Manifesto - Richard Stallman (FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION)
Recursive/Self referential phrase GNU stands for "GNU is Not Unix."
http://www.osdn.com/
GPL - COPYLEFT
GNU General Public License, the widely adopted, fully legal "anticopyright" treatise that today allows Linux and other software to remain completely free. SIGNS AWAY COPYRIGHT.
1991 Linux. Linus Torvalds (Linus + Minix (unix))
100,000 developers (release is made daily/even hourly)
Companies/Sites that service this community
SOURCEFORGE.NET
Infiltrated the work ethic of corporations
Open-source architecture
Eyebeam.org
Open-source Cola
Distributed intelligence & Distributed computing
So far everything we've been talking about in the class has been about computer networks and the sharing of 'data' and stored information.
Parellel computer and computer network are configured the same way, but are merely different in how they are used. Networked processors.
Danny Hillis. Parallel processing - data paralelle decomposition.
How to take linear processes and break them up to be solved ina non-linear/parallel manner
Massively Parallel computers
 Cray Supercomputer
Kasparov versus big blue
 Render Farm
3dmax & Maya render farms
Beowulf project. Organization dedicated to creating massive supercomputers from disposable hardware.
This idea of massive parallelism combined with the web for communal processing tasks.
 SETI at Home
Use the web as a massive parallel computer. People volunteer idle processing time for the use by seti
Seti at home stats
Users 3309486
Results received 374533183
Total CPU time 752202.051 years 0 hr 00 min
Floating Point
Operations 1.5 teraFLOPs. 1 with 21 0's
Average CPU time
per work unit 17 hr 35 min 36.0 sec
Peer to Peer
Where it has been moving the last few years.
The web is decentralized in terms of connectivity. The paths between me (my computer) and a server are many and redundant. However, in general, the data/content is still centralized thus facilitating monitoring.
 Client Server
 Pier to Pier
Peer to Peer decentralizes the content as well. Allowing for the network to be used in its fullest and completely circumvent monitoring mechanisms.
 Limewire
Napster is pseudo peer to peer. The big question with peer to peer is how do you locate anything. If there is no-one to ask. You have to find one person on the network, that person will have a list of some other people on the network, who in turn have a list of other people.
Following same path as the more centralized system of the internet.
http://www.daliworld.net
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