Chip Morningstar is an author, academic and developer of software systems for online entertainment and communication. A University of Michigan graduate, he participated in Project Xanadu, for which the word hypertext was first coined. Later, he overhauled the chat environment known as The Palace, allowing its user base to expand from 50,000 to one million users. In March 2001, the International Game Developers Association awarded Morningstar and Randy Farmer the "First Penguin Award" for their work on Lucasfilm's Habitat, the first large-scale virtual environment intended for massively multiuser operation.

He is known for "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything", an essay in which he presents a step-by-step procedure for deconstructing any given text. His interest in the subject stemmed from a 1991 conference in Santa Cruz, California, called the "Second International Conference on Cyberspace", at which he and Farmer gave a computer science-oriented presentation. After experiencing the "lit crit" which many other conference attendes enjoyed spouting, Morningstar decided to investigate more deeply. He writes,

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gödel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.

Morningstar currently resides in Palo Alto, California.

External links

• "Chip's site"
• "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat", by Morningstar and Farmer, presented at the First International Conference on Cyberspace (UT Austin, May 1990). Published in Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt (ed.), MIT Press 1991. ISBN 0-262-02327-X.
• Publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server
• "Making Java A Secure Programming Language", lecture Morningstar gave at Stanford University
• "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" (the version on the author's own website)
• Chip Morningstar at MobyGames

American non-fiction writers | Living people | People from the San Francisco Bay Area