[MUD-Dev] Re: Gender specific

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> wrote:

>and for that matter, reaching out to the 95%+ of *men* who don't play
>computer games.  They are intimidating and/or uninteresting even on the
>shelves, and those few that many women have played have been gifts and have
>not exactly energized them to run out and buy more.  Of course, the fact
>that most game developers are male (on top of that, most are single white
>males in their twenties) doesn't exactly endear them to a somewhat
>'foreign' market.  If anyone is being presumptuous here, it is the
>developers who cannot do more than snicker at the very people they would
>love to court as customers.

Good point.  So what is the "missing link"?  Is it only a lack of
interest, or is it installation.  I mean, I guess an average man in
his fifties would look at a "Formula 1" type car game and think "That
could be fun...".  So what keeps him back, is it painful memories of
prior experience with computers?  Having to ask the neighbours' kid to
fix his window setup after an installation failed, complaints about
lack of diskspace, uncertainty about whether his computer meets the
requirements or not, or something like that?

Maybe Java will open the market after all?

Ola.