I'm just curious is there somewhere a larger scale poll or other type of investigation for figuring out which type of people that play muds? Please post some links if you know.

Like what age, gender, occupation and so on...

We've done our own, but that usually only spans up to 100 participants or so... i'd like to see some larger scale stuff.

Have fun!

Although it focuses almost exclusively on graphical MUDs, check out Nick Yee's "Daedalus Project." It's got some problems, particularly involving the fact that all data gathered directly from players is done via opt-in methodology, but it's probably the best research on the psychology of MUDers available.

Hmm yeah, i tend to believe there is some difference betwen people that play graphical muds and people that prefer the text games. It would be fun to see which type of people that actually play text games and have some statistical research to back it up.

I think every mud owner would benifit if some of these larger community sites (tmc, tms, mudmagic), or games with larger pbases could do some survey on the matter... Just a simple webpage where people can fill in their data... and everything is displayed in some nice statistic page for public (not individual surveys of course, but overall stats).

It'd be nice, but pretty useless overall, I suspect. It's an opt-in poll, again, and the demographics that would take the time to participate in a poll on one of those sites aren't the same as the demographic of mud players generally. These forums are a good example. Probably half the people on them are admins on MUDs.

--matt