game ran on standalone PCs, a growing online community of players soon started exchanging their Norns via enthusiast websites [16, 41]. By 2001, Creatures Docking Station was released, an Internet-based add-on to Creatures 3 that allowed Norns to travel between different online worlds.22 The growing popularity of the Java programming language in the mid-1990s (Figure 1), and the ease with which it allowed programs to be distributed via applets embedded in web pages, led to a flourishing of websites hosting ALife-related applets. In 1996, Craig Reynolds ported his well-known Boids work, which had originally been published in 1987 [97], to a Java applet on his website.23 Various other Boids applets also appeared around the same time.24 One particularly noteworthy example was Floys by Ariel Dolan,25 which extended thetook place at the Artificial Life VII conference in 2000, held in Portland, Oregon. One aspect of the conference theme of “Looking backwards, looking forwards” was a drive to better understand the interests and opinions of the community regarding the status and direction of ALife as a field of study. In addition, the organizers wished to canvass the community on the establishment of a professional society. In order to achieve these tasks, Steen Rasmussen and colleagues set up a web-based survey that allowed open-ended responses to a number of questions formulated by a group of community members [93]. The survey was implemented using Active Server Pages33 technology, and stored responses in a database for further analysis. The survey authors produced histograms and mind maps from the results in