"Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can’t put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play."Format
I thought at least "the Halo 3" should amuse some of you. Anyway, twenty-two people, evenly divided in gender, were given a game to play involving balls and a line across the middle of the viewing ground (you may as well just look at it in the original Stanford link up at the top.) A constant stream of balls come towards the middle line, and the line will move left if hit by a ball and move right if the balls are far enough away from it. The participants were only told to click as many balls as they could, removing them from the screen, but everyone quickly found out that their "territory" to the left of the middle line had to be increased to "win".
Results
The results came in roughly equal for the genders in number of balls clicked, but the men came out with more territory than the women, by identifying the balls closest to the wall as needing to be clicked first. According to Alan Reiss, “The females ‘got’ the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect. They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed.” After looking at the visuals for brain activity from the fMRI the players were hooked to, the researchers noticed increased activity in the area of the brain representing both reward and addiction for whoever ended up with more territory, meaning, the males.
My Response
So the conclusion that made the headlines and became more general and underexplained with each repeated telling was "Men more addicted to video games". I have a couple of issues with the study, which I discussed here at VG Researcher alongside Wai Yen Tang's write-up about the study. My main issue was likely the fact that the researchers claimed this game was "a fairly representative, generic computer game." Boiling down video games into this one simplistic tech demo-level program seems unfair, though I understand it's necessary that the experiment eliminate as many variables as possible. The game, in the end, doesn't represent video games so much as goal-oriented activities due to its abstract nature. Therefore, I think that a better conclusion would likely be "men are more addicted to achieving abstract goals" instead of video games. It mostly makes me wonder if the same brain visual results would occur from, say, scoring in a sport or winning at roulette in a comparison between genders.
Another interesting point we happened upon in our discussion at VG Researcher was that games without specific goals tend to be the ones stereotypically associated with girl gamers. The Sims and the various match-three puzzle games are often associated with girl gamers, and at least The Sims doesn't have a specific goal the player must reach. The puzzle games don't especially either, with more of a vague infinite points system than levels or worlds to beat. One can never "beat" Tetris or Bejewled especially, and girls seem to have an easier time obsessing over it than Civilization IV.
The Stanford research team said they planned to do more research in the area, which is definitely what I'm looking for. It's an interesting topic, and it's not likely to lead to laws being passed against gaming, so I'm all for it. I still have some concerns about the findings that will need more study to resolve.
