Friday January 15th 1999
Month of building dangerously
Tony Durham
© 1999 TIMES Supplements LTD.
In a Soho-sized cyber city, trouble was always a possibility. Tony
Durham tells how community spirit triumphed
During December a city was built in cyberspace, with art galleries,
bars and night clubs, spacious mansions, an enigmatic pyramid, a sinister watchtower and a
network of roads. Open to anyone with a suitable PC and internet connection, the virtual
city has seen an outpouring of architectural creativity and community spirit which helped
it survive an outbreak of vandalism.
The 30-day experiment was initiated by Andy Smith, a PhD student at
University College London's centre for advanced spatial analysis. It took place in Active
Worlds, a universe of three-dimensional worlds, most of which are hosted at a website in
the United States (www.activeworlds.com).
Anyone can explore the worlds as a "tourist" but a payment
of $19.95 buys citizenship and the right to own land and erect permanent buildings.
The oldest and most popular world is Alphaworld, densely developed
with citizen-built structures. Smith says his world, hosted on a small server at UCL, is
"about the size of Soho in London. Alphaworld covers the size of Southern
California."
There are more than 440 worlds in the Active Worlds universe, but
many do not allow general building and most are planned, at least to the extent of having
a road grid and square plots. Smith, who has a master's degree in city and regional
planning from the University of Wales, Cardiff, wanted to see what happened in an
initially blank world where anyone could build freely, using a supply of parts. As
"Smithee" he spent hours in the world himself, chatting with visitors and
watching as they built Stonehenge, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building or whatever
took their fancy. Their dedication was phenomenal: some worked on their structures for
nine hours a day.
Vandalism was always a possibility and it happened almost
immediately.
Someone started placing objects indiscriminately, damaging
buildings. Smith changed the rules so that no one could build where someone else had
already placed an object. On day four the vandal returned. Within four hours 85,000
objects were strewn across the world. Normally a day's conventional building would add
about 500 objects to the world. The perpetrator probably used an automatic building
program, Robobuilder.
By day nine a community spirit had emerged. A builder called Stick
was ready to leave, having lost a building to vandalism and another when the server
crashed. Betty B, an Active Worlds citizen, offered Stick free citizenship and persuaded
him to carry on.
The vandal reappeared on day nine, claiming to be the high commander
of the Active Worlds Terrorist Group and threatening a full-scale hack on the server. This
never materialised, but Smith was temporarily deprived of email and internet access after
the hacker made an entry through his personal web server.
The company which owns Active Worlds, Circle of Fire Studios, traced
the incident to a 15-year-old boy in Canada. It is considering legal action.
This incident was qualitatively different from the good-natured
clashes which occur in any online community. A strip of unclaimed land within Lorca's plot
was used by Tom Huxton to erect a billboard. Everyone had a good laugh at this creative
use of space. Likewise when traditionalist Stick objected to the "party house"
built by CyberHar on a neighbouring plot and erected a sign: "CyberHar - Yuk! Don't
ever decorate my house!"
Personal tastes and free speech are things the community takes in
its stride.
The friends - and by now they were friends - gathered in the town
square on January 7 to hear the result of the building competition. The winner was Brenda,
a Florida resident who built a curvaceous house with panoramic windows. Andy Smith,
delighted with the 30-day experiment, is going to invite the builders back, this time for
a whole year.
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