The lost origin of an online holiday

For the past three years, I have been wanting to tell my version of a holiday called Fern Day that is unique to the citizens of a virtual world called Dreamscape which is coming up on its 14th year of operation (I blogged about its 10th Anniversary before). It’s the story of how something I helped start was adopted by a community and became a custom or kind of cultural norm that is practiced annually without connection to its deeper origins.

What is Fern Day?
On Aug 1, 2009, Fern Day was celebrated over the course of two days by the inhabitants of the city of Phantasus on the island of Kymer in a dream-like world called Dreamscape. Two full days of games developed and run by the world-wide community with virtual items given as prizes. And by “full-days” and “world-wide” I mean there are multiple games scheduled each hour from 1am to 11pm which implies multiple time-zones are involved. Additionally, there is a parade through the streets of Phantasus, a dance contest, a blessing of the Ferns, several ceremonies and retellings of the True History of Fern Day.

How Fern Day Started
I don't want to take away from what Fern Day is for the citizens of Phantasus and the inhabitants of Dreamscape, I hope that this secret origin of Fern Day will help other community managers and facilitators see ways they can instigate cultural changes in their own communities that will be accepted and adopted by the community members and become part of the cultural make-up of how those communities identify themselves.

About a month before the first Fern Day was celebrated, Aug 1, 1996, I was one of three community managers (called Oracles) who was trying find a holiday to celebrate during the month of August. The Dreamscape had been operating for just under one year and we knew early on that we wanted to celebrate existing holidays in a way that separated the Dreamscape from the everyday, offline and modern, “waking world”. We recognized that there would be pressure from the modern people inhabiting this virtual world to bring with them the holidays of their culture, nationality and religions and we didn't want to become caught up in disputes (which happened anyway and is another story for another time). Finally, we wanted to recognize natural cycles we cannot avoid, the cycles of the hours, the days, weeks, months and seasons because such cycles help tie people to places, and each other. So, we planned early on to include at the very least recognize holidays on a regular basis.

It was the nature of the Dreamscape that members of the community could not create objects or artwork on their own as one can today in Second Life or as one could in Active Worlds in 1996. This meant that all artwork was created by our company. In order to avoid overloading the art pipeline with holiday artwork, we planned to celebrate holidays every two months for one year, shift one month and keep going for another year. That way, in two years, we would have 12 holidays and could recycle art each year (that ultimately was doomed because we needed to refresh or create new art every year to keep interest up). Thus, Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanza were rolled together into a month-long winter fest (which included a very secular Santa Claus (called Kymer Kringle) and a nod to C. S. Lewis’s White Witch) .

So it was in July of 1996, I was looking for a holiday or set of holidays to appropriate and remix to our budding virtual world. Not finding much, I learned about Australia’s National Wattle Day, held Sept 1. Learning that it was a fairly new (less than 100 yrs old) holiday gave me the inspiration to, uhm, appropriate it. I moved it to August 1st and latched on to the only local flora the Dreamscape had in abundance, the fern which was purchasable in a vending machine for 160 Tokens (the virtual currency).

At the next meeting of the three community managers, the question arose, "What are we going to do about a holiday in August?". I suggested we celebrate "Fern Day". My compatriots looked at me confused and, figuring that the only way this would work is to be so over the top that it will take root, I continued like a carnival barker. "It will be fernomnonal! A full day of fernvolity, celebrating the ferntastic fern-ness of the fern." I may have concluded with, "unless someone has a better idea". Having done my research into the dearth of non-nationalistic holidays for August, I figured there would be none. It took no time for them to start fern puns of their own and the idea took root. Planning for the first Fern Day started.

On July 31, we publicly announced Fern Day with this message:

What: Phantasus Fern Festival
When: August 1st
Time: All day
Where: The streets of Phantasus
Hosts: Oracles and Acolytes

Come one, come all!

Help celebrate Phantasus Fern Day--The Dreamscape's first "official" in-world holiday! We will be celebrating with new vendos, new items, and of course...ferns! Bring your ferns or purchase new ones! Search amongst the foliage for hidden items! Fern Fun all day long!
The main idea is to have fun with ferns. There will be improptu [sic] games and visits by all three Oracles throughout the day. Here is a schedule of a few events:

9:00 AM WAT - Opening Ceremony Outside the Temple

Noon WAT - Fern Tag (Meet at Temple Street Terrance Lobby)

1:00 PM WAT - Drawing for prizes of players in Fern Tag

5:00 PM WAT \
- Blessing of the Ferns
5:30 PM WAT /

9:00 PM WAT - Closing Ceremony Outside of Temple

(WAT means Worlds Away Time which happened to be set the same as the servers)

and got exactly the same reaction from the community that I had gotten from my teammates. Our volunteer moderators (called Acolytes) were really at a loss to explain why all three community managers had just gone collectively insane. We chose not use the rational (and real) explanation of appropriating Wattle Day and instead flooded our poor volunteers with fern-puns, silly enthusiasm, and vague references to the "ancient origins" of a holiday that, until that moment, none of them had ever heard of. In other words, we used the time-honored justification of many cultural customs, "Because that's the way it's always been done".

The First Fern Day
Come August 1, 1996, the citizens of Phantasus were tentative about what was happening, but they became enthusiastic when the price of ferns were dropped from ~160 Tokens to a mere 10 Tokens. The scheduled game of Fern Tag was simple: find someone without a fern, give them a fern and them drag them to the game host who would record both names as part of a raffle. People were buying ferns fast and furious and zipping around the world handing them out and drawing more innocent bystanders into the chaotic whirlwind of fern-ness.

Then disaster struck. It seemed that there was a memory leak with the vendos that dispensed ferns. But this memory leak was on the *server* side. That means that the more people bought ferns, the slower and slower the servers hosting the entire virtual world were running until they eventually crashed, booting everyone out. Even when the world was brought back, it immediately crashed again. It looked like it would take many hours before the world could be brought back up so fern day would be over before it had a chance to even exist. People were feeling left out and understandably angry (likely the most angry were the poor developers who gave us no end of grief over what turned out to be an unscheduled load test on a Saturday). There was only one thing to do: apologize and make amends.

Dear Dreamscape Customers,

This is a letter to discuss the most recent and unfortunate events which occurred on Fern Day.

The terrible problems we experienced with our servers on what was quickly turning into an extremely festive occasion was as emotionally draining for us as it may have been for you. The Dreamscape was unavailable from 2:00 AM WAT - Noon WAT and from 2:00 PM WAT - 8:00 PM WAT. We have been working continuously to find the source of the problem and make the Dreamscape available to you. Unfortunately, at this time, we have been unable to determine the exact source of the problem. We are still investigating the situation and have implemented some changes which should keep the service stable. We deeply regret the inconvenience and imposition on the fun promised.

The Oracles have every intention of getting as much out of Fern Day as we hoped. To this end, we have extended the Fern Day Festival to Noon, August 2. We encourage you to come out as often as possible during the next 16 hours to celebrate Fern Day as we had intended to celebrate. We hope that those who had initially captured the spirit of Fern Day will regain it and sponsor or participate in the variety of games which were spontaneously popping up. At Noon, there will be a closing ceremony at the Main Doors of the Temple and soon after, the vendos will be removed from the streets. Even after this, we hope you will enjoy the ferns you have and the good memories which we will all share.

The Oracles and the Forum Sysops thank you for your generous patience and support in this matter and wish you a very happy Fern Day! We would also like to thank the Acolytes and the Forum Staff who helped out so much during the times in which the Dreamscape was unavailable.

Most sincerely,
Oracle Uni
Oracle Vaserius
Oracle Teresias
WorldsAway Community Forum Sysops
WorldsAway Team

from SUCKUP.TXT

The next day, folks turned up, amends were made, and the new closing ceremony included a recognition of the troubles we had all encountered. As an aside, it also meant that two community managers came in for an extra day of work when only one had been regularly scheduled (this is what you do when you are in customer and community service). Fern day was wrapped up, prices returned to normal, and we put it away until the next year.

How Fern Day really started
The next year, in preparation for the second annual celebration of Fern Day, Marianne G, who ran one of the newspapers for the virtual world posted a story of the "true history" of the origins of Fern Day which included the nickname “Crash Day”. We, the community managers, knew none of us had a hand in her history but it took only seconds to agree that we would support and even adopt her story as the origins. To do otherwise would discourage creativity and we thought her version was as good as any so we took the same, "because that's the way it's always been" attitude. Aug 1, 1997 was my last Fern Day in Dreamscape. In another two years, the last of the original community managers who stared blankly at me that July day had also moved on.

But by 1999, the community had claimed Fern Day as their own and over the next 10 plus years, the citizen-created history, games, parades, and ceremonies have evolved to include early beta testers (who never received official recognition for being pioneers – mea culpa) and even a group who call themselves Natives and claim to have inhabited this virtual world before even the beta testers. It's literally taken directions I never imagined it would. I could not be happier about it.

SecondLife for Nonprofits - Two Mixed Reality Events

Two seperate groups inspired by the Net Squared gathering of web innovators who promote social change are holding back-to-back events to discuss the potential of nonprofits making effective use of the virtual world platform, SecondLife.

Both are on July 18, 2006. Both take place partially inside SecondLife at the TechSoup online meeting space. BUT they each will be holding a simultaneous meeting in the physical world with video and audio being passed between the online and phsycial meeting spaces so both sets of participants can see and hear each other.

First up on July 18 at 3:30pm Pacific/6:30pm Eastern, the Ethos Roundtable will feature an introduction to Second Life. John Lester, Community Manager at Linden Lab, (the company that created and runs Second Life), will present a tour of this online community including how Second Life can be used for educational and non-profit work. John will have slides and also give an in-world demo to show you how Second Life works.

Ethos Roundtable event physical location:
77 Huron Avenue (Yahoo!Maps)
Cambridge, MA

Soon after that at 6:30pm Pacific/9:30pm Eastern, TechSoup will present on how nonprofits can effectively use SecondLife. Susan Tenby, Online Community Manager of TechSoup.org, and Jeska Dzwigalski, Community Manager at Linden Lab will also present a tour of this online community, including TechSoup's satellite office and demo a directory of nonprofit organizations in the Second Life world. The event will feature a number of guest speakers from organizations who are actively working in the Second Life community to better achieve their organization's missions.

I'll be attending the TechSoup event in both the physical and online sense. I'm easy to spot in SecondLife as I made my avatar look like me (though avatar customization hasn't quite caught up with my actual beard growth).

TechSoup event physical location:
Net^2 HQ
322 Ritch St. 2nd Floor (Yahoo!Maps)
San Francisco, CA
415-633-9446

BOTH events take place online in the same online location. Go directly to the TechSoup area in SecondLife by following this SLurl:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/InfoIsland/52/171/33/

To ensure smooth operation of the online event, the organizers will restrict the TechSoup space to 50 members, and they will allow those in on a first-come-first-serve basis. Arrive early to secure your spot.

You will need to download (25-50MB) and register (free) for SecondLife to visit the online location. I strongly recommend you make sure you can run SecondLife early as it has some fairly strict system requirements.

Once you get started, take a look at the SecondLife Wiki for some more info on how to operate SecondLife. (Or just hit o get the chat input and start asking people for help.)

Also read what some nonprofits, innovators and activists are doing in SecondLife.

Other folks who blogged recently about nonprofits in SecondLife:

Non-profits in Second Life at Omidyar Network

Nonprofit Life in Second Life at Spare Change

Announcing the TechSoup Second Life Event: July 18th at 6:00 PM PST at Beth's Blog

Second Life for Nonprofits at sufolla - community weavers

Tech Soup to offer mixed reality event in person and in second life at Second Life Library 2.0

Are you drinking the Metaverse Kool-Aid?

Over the past year, I've been encountering more and more people enthusiastic about the potential of a Metaverse in the vein of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Today, we have the Metaverse Roadmap project and an Open Source Metaverse Project. Break out the Kool-Aid because it's deja-vu all over again.

I first read Snow Crash 10 years ago as required reading for working on VZones (nee WorldsAway) and, at the time, I was struck by the dystopia that Stephenson develops in contrast to his Mardi Gras vision of the Metaverse. I was particularly mindful that what made the virtual world so alluring was that the physical world was such a economic, political and social mess. It seemed to me that people in the novel entering the Metaverse were seeking something the bleak logo-festooned burbclave reality could not offer, whether it was entertainment/distraction or connection/contacts. It was in a very palpable way a Hyperreality - an idealized imitation or simulation of reality that, through it's simulation, is better than the real thing. Disney's Main Street USA is a hyperreal vision of America. Historical reenactment is a hyperreal vision of history.

After the most recent Game Developers Conference, I felt the urge to pick up Snow Crash once again, just to see if perhaps the years had added additional layers to my view that the Metaverse was not a practical vision for wide-reaching socialization technology. I can say that the years did little to change my view. If anything, the intervening years of text messaging, blackberries, and other mobile connectivity devices that are incapable of rendering 3d polygons, but are great at simply and quickly connecting people reinforce my opinion that modeling after the Metaverse as technology, tends to blind folks to the social implications.

In other words, regardless if you want to bring people together online for economic reasons, political reasons, cultural reasons or social reasons, don't be distracted by blue technology such that you forget why you are doing it in the first place.

Virtual World Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary

Today at 5PM Pacific Standard Time, the virtual world Dreamscape running on the VZones platform will be officially 10 years old.

Dreamscape circa 1995

From 1995 to 1998, I was one of the community managers and honestly, I didn't expect the place to still be around. Fujitsu had sunk several million dollars into a new version of the Habitat world. The idea was that it could be a platform which could be licensed to others who would build and maintain their own worlds. In order to convince the world that the platform was a place for viable online communities within a virtual environment, a flag-ship product was planned. The profitability of this flag-ship community was always on the mind of Fujitsu and there were times the whole project was almost scuttled before it launched.

Oracle Uni, Oracle Teresias (Me) and Oracle Vaserius welcome Brother Echo (bald man in the back) to being a World Manager (1998)

So, it's really wonderful to see that, 10 years later, much of the central planning over user created content has been decentralized. When we started, there were few objects that did things and little artwork to keep the illusion of variety fresh. 10 years ago, there were 3 Oracles inside the world "managing" the social and physical layout of the world who oversaw about 20 volunteer Acolytes helping settle dispute and handle serious troublemakers. Today, the official staff roster includes Director, World Managers, Senior Oracles, Oracles, Acolytes and Acolyte Painters, or roughly 60 people.

But that's not all, some of these staff are responsible for helping guide Pans, Proprietors, Mages, Muses, Creators, Natives, Welcomers, Security Bears, Jesters, Thespians, Sprites. I don't know how many people are on the rosters of each of these. But that's not the important bit part. These volunteer subgroups fall into two basic categories: content creators and support. Mages, Muses and Natives and the other fantasy named groups create stories of the world, often retelling events that actually happened. The Proprietors, the Welcomers and the Security Bears support the trade of objects, the integration of newcomers and crime prevention education.

While it's not fully decentralized, the inverse pyramid of support where the world director supports, the world managers who support the volunteer groups who support everyone else is much, much bigger and more capable that what we were doing 10 years ago. The key to this little virtual world hanging in there for 10 years is that the people inhabiting the world have many more opportunities to have a lasting effect on the world and others who come after them. The world is much more vibrant than when I was there 7 years ago and it shows.

Dreamscape in 2005

You've come a long way baby. Here's to you!

Hello Kitty MMORPG

I recently read Richard Bartle's Soapbox: Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really! wherein he argues that the pressure to appeal to newbies creates a downward spiraling cycle of Massively Multiplayer Online design. (Also reference Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy which I boil down to as "just because it's good and efficient for one member, does not mean it's good and efficient for the group as a whole".) But this post is not about that, at least, not directly.

No, this is about potentially the mother of all branded MMOs/virtual environments, the Hello Kitty World! Looking past the uber-cuteness, the worldwide brand recognition and the cute and fluffiness of it all, Richard's words seem like and an epitaph of a world that hasn't even been born. Even though I doubt there will be a direct connection between the newbies of Everquest II hoisting their expectations onto poor Hello Kitty and fluffy friends, the feature list is clearly influenced by the generations of MMORPGs (and their newbies):

• "Special in-game telepathy". In other words, global shouts continue. I wonder if they will also have teleportation within a city or country. (An example from Richard's article.)
• Players will be in one of three countries which are in competition with each other. That gives us shards (though players can travel between countries) and instanced in-world games (I'll bet money they are).
• The economy play. Play games for in-world money, trade items, open shops. I'm guessing that running a brothel out of your in-world house might be frowned on. I'm personally more curious if they will try to squelch any emerging eBay market for in-world items.

This is not to say that Hello Kitty World isn't going to be huge and healthily line the pockets of Sanrio. It is to say that I highly doubt we are going to see much innovation advancing the art of virtual environment design. And with it's potential to give so many people their first impression of large scale multiplayer gaming, that's a shame.

(Original Hello Kitty World link from Tom Coate's plasticbag del.icio.us feed.)