Background:  Released in 1991, Sid Meier's CIVILIZATION^R by MICROPROSE^R made gaming history as the best selling strategy game for kids to adults with over 850,000 copies sold. In 1996, Sid Meier's CIVILIZATION II, the ultimate version of the best-selling strategy game, and CONFLICTS IN CIVILIZATION SCENARIOS were introduced.

Problem/Question: As the owner and webmaster of "The Ultimate CivII Site" since August '96 and provider of a free but valuable service, I was interested in exactly who were my most likely "customers". MICROPROSE^R representatives, impressed by the site and interested in partnerships, would also be forwarded a customer profile.

Hypotheses: I believe that the typical player of computer strategy games, such as CIVILIZATION II, is a North American, male, 13-18 year old high school student who plays computer games 5-10 hours per week and who plays CivII, in particular, 1-5 hours per week on average. The typical visitor of the CivII site has had Internet access from home for more than 2 years and uses a local ISP, a Windows95 operating system, a Netscape Navigator 3.x browser and an access speed of 28.8kps. He generally surfs the World Wide Web's Computers & Internet and Entertainment sites and, in addition to WWW, uses E-mail, FTP and Newsgroups services. He spends 35-50 hours per week on-line, "visits" every other week primarily looking for downloads, uses the frames version and rates the site 8/10.

Procedure: (Collect primary data from a sample of site visitors):

1. Write an introduction to the computer survey explaining who is

conducting the survey, why it is being done and that only one submission per person is requested.

2. Create 20 survey questions including demographic information.

3. To make the answers as easy as possible to tabulate, formulate

multiple choice questions.

4. Insure confidentiality of respondents.

5. Write HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code for the survey

questions.

6. Upload the survey to run for 30 days in October '97 (~300 responses).

7. Check E-mail daily, print new survey responses and number

the submissions as they are received.

8. Periodically, using an Excel 97 spreadsheet, enter the survey

response data.

9. Tabulate/graph the frequency distribution data/percentages for survey questions and upload the results to the server.

Conclusions: The customer profile established was generally as predicted. However, it was surprising that typical players were almost exclusively male and percentages of players employed full-time and 18-25 or 25-40 years old were relatively high.

Applying The Finding: Based on my work with The Ultimate CivII Site, I was asked by MICROPROSE^R to assist in the selection of the scenarios for CIVII FANTASTIC WORLDS (released Nov.'97). I was also asked to be one of MICROPROSE's private beta testers with the development of the latest CIVILIZATION II add-on, ULTIMATE CIVII, scheduled for release by June 1998. Determining how to make strategy games more appealing to the apparently untapped female market appears to be a valuable direction to pursue in the future.