[Milawe]

As with any type of discussion like this, I'm going to make a lot of generalizations that don't fit everyone in a specific gender set because that is nearly impossible:

What do men and women look for in a MUD/Differences in game play?

Generally, I think that more men are better at the mechanics aspects of the game, though you can always find a few women who stand out. Combat or mechanics where you can fail and fail large, often cause stress and sometimes panic. Men and women often react to stress very differently due to hormones, usually the specific hormones of cortisol, epinephrine, and oxytocin. When women become stressed, levels of epinephrine and cortisol rise, but we also release a lot more oxytocin than men. Oxytocin lessens the effects of epinephrine and cortisol allowing us to be less "stressed" since it is a relaxing and stress-reducing hormone. Men also release oxytocin but in much lower amounts allowing them to stay alert and with heightened senses and putting them in a more "fight" rather "flight" status. So, the biological differences between men and women probably play some part in this. These hormones also play a good part in our "befriend", "flight" or "fight" states, which likely explains why women are drawn more toward the social roles in multiplayer games. (As always, there are exceptions to this.)

Socially, men are put in competative, high-stress situations more often than women simply due to sports. The sports centric cultures of the world are disproportionately male, which gears them easily towards things like PvP and hack 'n slash mechanics.

Advantages and Disadvantages?

When it comes to min/maxing and munchkining game mechanics, I think that men usually have an advantage. My husband and I are both avid gamers, and we might be similarly skilled when it comes to actual skill and strategy, but he trounces me in min-maxing everything down to figuring out the highest xp/sec ratio. (Hey, I never even bother to figure that out.) Again, I'm not really sure why this is, though I could probably look up a lot of biological factors and apply it. All I know is that when we were both asked to draw a bike just from memory, my bike wouldn't have been able to go anywhere since I didn't have the chain connected to pedals. His bike, while insanely ugly, would have been operable. He just thinks about the nitty gritty while I tend to look at the big picture. So, if I have him min-max my character, I have a good chance of competing with him in skill, but if I had to min-max my own, I'd probably lose out.

When it comes to social aspects of a game, though, I easily have more people to call on, but he'd put together a more skilled group. So, again, it comes down to mechcanics vs. social differences for us.

As for women being in administrative positions, it depends on the women, I believe. Two of our head coders are men, but we have more women than men on our team. When it comes to the heavy coding, we have more men, but when it comes to world building, writing and lore, our staff is almost completely women. We also have two women who do the project management for building and areas, and two who do basic coding. Ultimately, our team consists of more women and men, and everyone is treated pretty equally since they each have their own field of expertise. In the end, though, without the coders, all the writing and area designing in the world isn't going to do the game a bit of good, so the coders end up making the world go 'round.

Why are there more men than women?

Ultimately, I think this is a matter of social up-bringing. Girls are pushed more towards "girl" activities which does not include DnD, gaming, or high stress activities. Boys tend to rough house at an early age, and they really aren't discouraged from much besides not playing with dolls. (Though, they do get to play with action figures, which are basically dolls you just don't baby.) It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is because girl gamers have broken out of the "norm". All I know is that with most women I talk to on a day-to-day basis, they can't even conceive of what I do or why I do it while men are more interested and seem to think it's "cool". Gaming doesn't seem to be a "girl" activity, and girls tend to flock more towards activities geared towards girls. I think, possibly, a lot of games are geared towards men in general. (For example, Age of Conan had very little to appeal for a woman, in my opinion, and even though I play a ton of male dominated games that I enjoyed, I definitely felt that they went out of their way to cater to guys.)

I do, ultimately, get less gaming time than my husband because I do think of a lot of things like "Gee, someone needs to vacuum" or "Someone's got to get dinner on the table". Luckily, he usually follows my lead when I log off a game, but somehow, he usually finds more play time. (I think he stays up, but since he also gets up, I can't really say anything about that.)