[MUD-Dev] Gender and Mud Development

[Adam Wiggins]

On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> You know, one thing that is kind of interesting about the fact that fewer
> females play MUDs is that they tend to be highly valued as companions by
> all the males who cannot get a date. I occassionally get female players
> 'complaining' (I'm not sure how heart-felt these complaints are) about all
> the help they get offered, all the people that want to talk to them, etc
> etc. I've actually considered, in the past, PAYING females to play just to
> keep some of the males satisfied.

Sure, and there are also plenty of males that abuse this particular
phenomenon.  I had a mudding buddy who was an absolute master at it;
he'd create a female character with a cute, feminine name and walk around
acting like a flirtatious newbie.  He logged onto a mud I had been playing
for months and within fifteen minutes he had better equipment and more
money than I had managed to acculmulate through normal play over the month
or two I had been playing there.

On the flip side, there are other muds where this doesn't work.  It's
usually the ones where the gender of your character actually affects gameplay
to some extent: for example, what classes your character can become (for
example, "witch" is a female-only class while "monk" is male-only), what
areas you can go do (AnotherMUD had the "Amazons" area where the amazon
warriors would attack males on sight, but leave females alone), and so
forth.  As a result, people choose the gender for their character based
on what kind of character they want to play, and you end up with a 50/50
gender split on characters, even if the playerbase doesn't actually
reflect that.  And as a result, people learn that you can't assume the
player's gender based on the gender of the character, and just worry about
the whole issue a lot less.

Adam W.




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev