[MUD-Dev] Re: (fwd) Re: POLL: Games ruined by bad players (Playe

[Dr. Cat]

> Actually I think an effort to make a good clean game are laudable.
> 
> Both my son and daughter found your web page to quite enticing and 
> begged me to let them play.  However, I don't let them get into 
> anything that even remotely resembles IRC, too much crap out there, 
> just supervised wed surfing. :)   
> 
> I was wondering whether you have any handle on the age of your users? 

There is a small amount of policing done right now by four of our adult 
players acting as volunteers, and by my partner and myself.  Enough to 
keep out most of the sexual harrassment, the server crashers and the kids 
that think standing in a crowd and yelling out obnoxious stuff non-stop 
is good fun.  But it's probably not enough policing for most concerned 
parents to leave kids in there unsupervised.  We might provide that level 
of safety when we have things like "revenues" and "paid staff" and the like.

We're hoping to get users of all ages, though the subject matter and art 
style do appeal strongly to children.  We haven't started collecting 
demographic information as part of the registration process yet (we WILL 
do this soon, now that we're aiming at being an advertising supported 
service), but one of the women that plays the game, on her own 
initiative, set up a web based survey form.  There's only 60 responses so 
far, self-selected sample, etc. etc., but it's at least a hint of what 
our audience looks like.  All the results are at:

    http://members.xoom.com/woodsong/furcadia/results.html

At present, it shows 79% of the people responding gave their age as being 
in the range 10-21.  53% say they are male in real life, and 47% say 
they're female, which pleases me.  I'd hate to be missing out on half of 
the human population as potential audience members, the way the majority 
of computer games do now!  :X)

*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------* 
   Dr. Cat / Dragon's Eye Productions       ||       Free alpha test:
*-------------------------------------------**  http://www.bga.com/furcadia
  Furcadia - a new graphic mud for PCs!     ||  Let your imagination soar!
*-------------------------------------------**-----------------------------*

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MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.