The video game gender debate has been going on for years now, fueled mainly by complaints that the video game industry continues to make games that primarily appeal to males (woo hoo for that!). Perhaps it's not the fault of the video game industry, but a result of a psychological tendency. A new study reports that men's brains are more responsive to video games than women's.
According to MRI scans, the zones of the brain associated with reward and addiction are much more active in men's brains when they played a simple video game. Last year, there was an effort to get the American Medical Association to classify video game addiction as an official disorder -- perhaps these folks now have some more evidence to support that claim.
So why does it seem like guys like video games more than women? I'm sure there are plenty of women who like to blow stuff up and battle pixilated monsters or throw a 90-yard bomb. But, it's mainly a guy thing. So why is that?
That's what Fumiko Hoeft wanted to figure out. She's a researcher with the Stanford School of Medicine. She arranged a pretty cool experiment. She got 22 Stanford undergrads -- 11 men and 11 women -- to play a video game inside an MRI scanner, a machine that allows scientists to see what's happening inside the body.
As the young gamers were in the MRI machine happily playing away, Fumiko took a look at what was happening inside their brains. "What happened was that both men and women showed activation in regions that are related to the reward and addiction circuitry, but what was interesting was that there was significant difference in the amount of activation and the amount of coherence, how they were moving together."
Specifically, men's brains were much more active. And it wasn't because the game was particularly violent. If fact, it was pretty boring -- just clicking a bunch of balls bouncing off a wall at the middle of the screen.
Researchers designed this video game with a specific "gain-loss" component, which is a fancy way of saying that players have to nuke the red dot before it gets too close to the wall. If you nuke the dot, you gain territory; the space on the left gets bigger. That's the mission. If the ball hits the line before you nuke it, you lose territory. Researchers didn't explain this goal to the players. They wanted their natural instincts to take over. Many would argue men, by nature, are more territorial.
Men got more of a "reward" feeling than their female counterparts, and when the participants played a video game that had no territorial aspect, there was no difference in men's and women's brain activation. While this is obviously a new area of research and a small sampling, researchers say the gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to video games and more likely to become "hooked" on them than females. It's also interesting to note that the computer games that are popular with males are territory and aggression-type games.
But the object of the game was telling. By clicking the balls in a certain way, the players could gain or lose territory. And men were significantly more hyped up by this challenge.
So in the end, Fumiko's point isn't that men like video games more than women (or men are smarter). That probably depends on the game. It's about how males seem to be more hard-wired than women are to get excited about claiming and conquering territory. Maybe that's why so many video games are about war and mowing down wave after wave of enemies. They're designed to appeal to the 'cave man' conqueror in men.
I should probably call in sick tomorrow...I am only on level 6 right now....
