[MUD-Dev] Metric vs. English System of Measurement in Games

ceo ceo at grexengine.com
Thu Jan 13 00:10:01 CET 2005


Michael Hartman wrote:
> ceo wrote:

>> In imperial: women are all 5-something, men are 6-something.

> The average height of an adult male in the US and Western Europe
> is 5'8".

Again, (and this is the last time), I'm not defending it, only
attempting to rationalize it, based upon extensive discussions with
people in this country, trying to understand where they are coming
from.

There's a lot of nit-picking replies going back and forth here, and
in general response: use common sense; that's what the 50 million
odd people who *believe* these things I'm relaying do.

The "average height of an adult male" includes a lot of people over
the age of 50 with slipped discs (3 inch loss in the case of one
friend recently) and other age-related loss of height. It also
includes a lot of malnourished people.

If you go to the Scandinavian countries only, you'll see a massive
warping of that statistic, so much so that the 5-8 statistic is
clearly irrelevant. Then again, because the populaiton of countries
like Norway is comparable to the population ... of London (within
10% IIRC) they don't impact the average so much.

In the UK, the "visible population" i.e. those visible every day in
the streets, in the media, in working environments have an average
male height much much closer to 6 foot. In fact, IIRC (vaguely) the
average for people under 40 years old is 5-11 or 6-0.

Anyway, back on topic: one thing that is abundantly clear from the
whole thread is that you almost certainly want to make it
user-configurable! :D. This is something I believed already, but had
grossly underestimated the extent of until now.

Adam M
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