[MUD-Dev] "Men are from Quake, Women are from Ultima"

[Michael Tresca]

Raph Koster posted on Saturday, January 13, 2001 1:34 AM:

> My understanding is that most of the women gamers are in fact playing
> casual games, card games and the like. And my other understanding is
> that the conversion rate from those games to subscription based games
> is abysmal (sub 5%). Has anyone on the list seen a spike in female
> players over the last five years, and does anyone attribute it to
> increased gender balance on the Internet?

Yep. Our gaming populace was at one point 25% female, which was unusual for
RetroMUD.  At first I thought this was because RetroMUD was more friendly to
females than other MUDs.  After a little research, I discovered the
demographics of the Internet had shifted and our numbers weren't necessarily
all that strange -- I was just out of touch with what percentage of Internet
users (and proportionately, gamers) was female.

I've seen enough MUDs to know that they are not generally concerned about
gender biases.  In some cases, rather than query gender, the gender is
simply he/his/him by default.  Then there's the quests that defame women
(rape the maiden to get the quest!), the all-female prostitution houses,
etc.

In short, a lot of MUDs don't even bother, because they assumed that their
demographic was all male by default.  A lot of those MUDs still exist today,
although I wonder if they've adapted to fit the changing demographics.

Michael "Talien" Tresca
RetroMUD Administrator
http://www.retromud.org
telnet://retromud.org 3000

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