Such stuff always makes me happy that I don’t life in the USA.
Nothing against some of the other things, but software patents on arbitary crap definitely is something between plain stupid and an active step to ensure that courts and lawyers always have work
1994? Lol. There’s so much prior art as to make their claim of an original patent laughable. Various multi-user versions of ‘Adventure’ available on Compuserve in the early 80’s, certain galacticom bbs games and most especially DikuMud and all it’s derivatives… And that’s just off the top of my head.
I skimmed through the patent. Besides the fact that they specify 3D environment, most of the documentation can be applied to MUDs. Even besides mud games, I remember some 3d from back in the day. Merridian 59 is the first one comes to mind… a quick lookup on wikipedia shows that it was credited as the first mmorpg and was released in 1995. So it was easily in development prior 1994, before that patent was filed.
they have penguin avatar on their patent… 
http://www.google.com/patents?id=wv5-AAAAEBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=7,181,690&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1_1
… be careful guys, if you are making MMO avoid penguin at all cost 
As usual one of the great webcomics has summed this up quite well.
Is ut possible that this is merely a push for publicity?
After reading the patent that was filed in 2000. It seems they have patented the already well known acceptable network model for online games, specifically the fps genre.
More the common coward attempt to make some cash by ripping of others with fantasy patents.