[MUD-Dev] RE: The Price of Being Male

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 02 July 2003, Tazzik wrote:

> Taking these simple truths, I fail to see how the price difference
> could be a surprise to anyone:

>   1) The majority of men prefer to play as male characters.

>   2) The majority of players in these games are men.

>   3) Greater demand equates to a higher price, especially in an
>   auction setting.

Your point 3) doesn't account for supply.

Suppose 10 men are looking to buy a male character on eBay.  If
there were 8 candidate male characters for sale, the auction
mechanism would raise the prices until 2 players dropped out of the
bidding. However, if there were 12 candidate male characters for
sale, this wouldn't happen because everyone can have what they want
by bidding the reserve price.

In practice, there may be some competition because the players know
what the supply is but don't know what the demand is, but the prices
paid would in general be expected to be lower if demand was below
supply.

> It looks to me as though we already have a pretty clear cause and
> effect for this situation, without trying to force some inferences
> of sexual discrimination in there.

I think perhaps one of the problems we're seeing here is that what
people have come to understand by the term "sexual discrimination"
has overtones that go beyond the actual statement itself.

When two equal-ability characters are available for purchase, the
player must differentiate between them: this is therefore a process
of "discrimination", in the sense that if you wanted to buy a jacket
and there were two that were suitable, you'd have to discriminate
between them using features beyond the functionality of their being
a suitable jacket. If one of the factors players use to choose
between characters is the gender of thosee characters, that would be
a form of sexual discrimination, ie. they're making a distinction
between characters based on the gender of those characters. The
phrase "sexual discimination" is loaded with all manner of
implications of unfairness and prejudice, though, none of which
necessarily apply in this case.

Ironically, it could be that players paid more for male characters
than for female ones simply because they hadn't realised that they
could get female ones cheaper. Ted's paper may alert them to this
fact, and we may therefore see more people buying female characters
- thus driving up the price, while relieving the pressure on the
price for male characters.  I wouldn't bank on it, though...

		Richard
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