Week 3B

In the article, The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, the author describes one of the primary virtual world setups.  The article describes a 'habitat' with human characters known as avatars.  These avatars can perform everyday human activities from carrying objects to performing a job to interacting with other avatars.  By observing the picture in the article that is an actual snapshot of the game, the reader can gain a first-hand look at the game itself.  It is evident that the game has a very simple design and has very low graphics quality.  This is not surprising since the idea is cutting edge among the virtual world.  After the game's creation, several problems arose due to the game's primary existence.  At first it was a challenge determining the number of participants that the game server could handle.  At first 20,000 participants had allowance to play with plans in the making to allow up to 50,000 participants.  It was difficult to create enough different activities for 20,000 people but game creators worked around this problem.  Creators set up different activities that can be performed as well as different settings.  Yes, some apartments have the same appearance, but it's stated that every magical forest has a different appearance.  Creators also ran into problems with weapons and violence as well as wealth issues.  They worked around these problems too by changing the locations where violence was allowed, and they changed the dollar amount of items at pawn locations which created an equal dollar value.  As you can see, game creators ran into several problems after the game's creation but they fixed them as they came about with ease.