[MUD-Dev] Gender and Mud Development (back on topic, some)

[Katrina McClelan]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Jon A. Lambert wrote:

> Now the demographics I'm shooting for are in the range of a 60/40 or 
> 70/30 split between men/women.  And I think this is pushing it.  Why? 
> Well, as Katrina alluded to in another post, role-play in mixed groups is 
> very different.  Personally, I think it is better.  There's a whole 
> different level of civility, interaction and tension, than with an all-
> male role-play group.  I also think role-play in a mixed group, 
> particularly a lone female and the rest male tends to be much worse than 
> either.  Males playing females just doesn't cut it either.  As an avenue 
> for creative roleplay sure, but as a method to make up for the scarcity 
> of women in a game, it just doesn't hunt.  

Just a note.  I alluded to an all female game being different, and it is.
But that isn't to say that an all-female group doesn't enjoy hunting down
monsters and exploring dungeons.  It is just handled quite differently.
Instead of dwarven warriors, and invokers and brute strength in terms of
numbers and game mechanics that you tend to find in the makeup of a male
group, you'll find a lot of gnome illusionists, elven enchanters, bards,
an priests and such in a female group.  Generally the all female group
will delight in solving puzzles, and creatively handling monsters, where
as the male group will tend to have a makeup of at least some characters
that will tend towards a berserker mentality.  Bringing it back to a mud
level, when is the last time you saw a mud let you use illusions, traps,
and tactical combat for handling monsters instead of brute force?  And by
tactical, I mean making use of the terrain, as well as skills.  In one
game we used a charmed enemy, and an illusion (both spells availible to
new characters) to lure a pair of ogres into a castle courtyard, and then
droped the portcullis, and picked them off with arrows and spells from our
perches atop the towers.  Very creative and tactical, but not something
that you can accomplish with most mud engines (mine included).  The room
layout typical of most muds does not lend to this for starters (noting
that the discussions in this circle present ways to improve this vastly),
but even with a reasonable representation of terrain, handling such things
is not a simple problem for a computer.  I'd love to hear ideas on it from
the gallery.

Another note is that a lot of muds, you go out and beat on monsters for
the sake of beating on them.  Gamers I've played with are all for hunting
down the ogres that have been terrorizing the locals, but not for hunting
down a pair of ogres that are minding their own business.  I've been in
groups where we've actually befriended some of the "random" encounters and
built allies out of them.  I think it's somewhat of a misconception that
women are turned off by the element of violence in an RPG.  It's the
gratuitous(sp) violence that does it.  However, again, building a
user-influenced story engine into a mud that is both versitile, and
reasonable to configure for "story tellers" is not a simple problem.  
Again ideas are welcome :)

-Katrina




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