Did you ever wonder why there aren’t that many games out there catering to the female demographic? Perhaps it’s because game developers know that inside the brain, video games are more exciting and worthwhile for men than they are for women.
When I was first given this assignment, I read the headline and jokes and sarcasm started to sprout from my mind. Then I read the story and decided to take a more detailed look into this study that seems to point out the obvious for some of us.
According to the article found in the NY Times, a new study finds that when men play games, a part of the brain involved in feelings of reward and addiction becomes much more active than it does in women.
"This may explain why men are more likely to report feeling addicted to video games than women are, the researchers say in an online article in The Journal of Psychiatric Research. The lead author is Fumiko Hoeft of the Stanford University School of Medicine.
"For the study, the researchers took a group of 22 young volunteers – half men, half women – and had them play a game as an M.R.I. machine looked at what was happening in their brains. The study found that in the men, there was much more activity in the mesocorticolimbic system.
"Given the abundance in video games of violence and other themes near and dear to many men, there may be a natural explanation for why their brains light up more. But the senior author of the study, Dr. Allan L. Reiss, said the researchers made a point of steering the game they used in a more neutral direction."
Well what if they used a simple game instead? Would both men and women have the same response when faced with such a task?
"The volunteers played a simple game in which they were told only to click the images of balls they saw, with no mention of a goal. The players soon figured out that if they kept the balls from advancing too close to a wall, they gained ground. Both the men and the women did well – but the men did a lot better and appeared more motivated to acquire terrain."
This study answers a few questions that some of us might think of as obvious, but what would interest me is to see how this translates into real life conditions. Is it because a man has more motivation in completing tasks that involves risks and analysis (such as you would find in a strategy game) that account for only male generals in the U.S. military?
Does hand-eye coordination in racing games actually help the driver in real life to react more quickly to traffic mishaps, and can you seperate such statistics by gender? Even though the study states the obvious it is interesting to know officially that it’s true and not just a myth.
It’s not saying woman don’t play video games, just that a lot more men do than women. Do you think publishers should be catering more to the female gender or should they just stick with what they have been doing for all of these years?
