Reading the stories here shows how deep and rich the interactions between the players and the world were. It's basically a very retro Second Life; the original, in fact. Amazing achievement, and really funny seeing developers not 'cheat' to deal with their own mistakes and failures (e.g. trading Death's one-shot kill gun for money in a town square after Death was killed and dropped that gun, because he forgot to heal).

Lessons from Habitat is one of my preferred papers of all times. I discovered for the first time in the 90's [1], and re-read many times over the years, and it still impresses me how much they achieved with such low-tech.

[1] I wasn't a user, but read about it in connection with Snow Crash, another fascinating read http://www.verbalworkout.com/ub/ub130/ub13002028.htm

I would love to see what a new edition of this Stanford course would present. That site was from 1998. Technology-mediated virtual worlds have grown quite a bit since. :)