[MUD-Dev] Gender and Mud Development

[Travis S. Casey]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Adam Wiggins 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.

I've experienced this a few times; I've had one mud on which I played a
female character (mainly because I was an admin on the mud, and hoped that
playing the opposite sex would make it less likely that people would
figure out who I was) and I've had one where I played a male elf named
"Tilante", who people kept thinking was female -- I guess that name
somehow sounded female, since the people who thought I was female had only
seen me in the "who" list.

People were generally much more willing to help me out and would give me
equipment, etc., even *without* my flirting with them.  On the minus side,
I was often bothered by people who wanted to chat, and sometimes by a few
weird birds -- like one guy who started his first conversation with me by
asking "are you slinky?"  I only experienced anything that I would call
harrassment a couple of times -- oddly enough, that seemed to happen more 
often when I was playing Tilante.  Maybe people were annoyed by finding
out I was male and wanted some sort of "revenge" -- I don't know.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
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