thinkzinc notes a story indicating that, according to a new study, men have a harder time putting down a controller than women do. Researchers at Stanford did brain imaging work on a group of young test subjects while they played a simple PC game. Besides the 'obvious' conclusion that men were more 'aggressive at gaining territory on the screen', the tests also indicated that male brains showed more activity in the reward and addiction components of the brain. "The lead author, Dr. Allan Reiss, noted that most of the video games that are popular with men are territory and aggression-type games. 'These gender differences in the brain may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become hooked on video games than females,' he said. Other recent surveys indicate that about 40 percent of Americans regularly play games on a computer or console, but young males are two or three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, Reiss said. "
I know this is/. and people round here don't interact that many women apart from the pictures you mention, but if they did they would also find that women like them too.
I've always thought it was interesting that many women seem to be fans of Atari's Centipede arcade game, and it was supposedly the first arcade game written by a woman.
I have a theory on why some women would enjoy a game that involves cutting a long snaky thing into pieces before it can get to them, but I'm not going to get into that here
I agree. While using a "territory" game may fall inline with the mass's perception of video games, they're not the only games out there. The industry has evolved to gear games at their male target audience, though recently innovative and casual games outside of the "territory and agression" mentality are becoming common.
When you test subjects on games in which the male brain is supposed to be inclined, it should be little surprise that they find the games more addictive. This shouldn't necessarily mean
Precisely. Most modern games are written for men, because men were the big audience when they came out, because men were the ones writing them when they came out. Can't really study something so heavily biased and expect the bias to go away.
Try them on a game like Animal Crossing or Nintendogs or something and if guys are still more likely to get addicted than I'll buy the verdict.
For some anecdotal evidence one of my relatives is a total anti-gamer except for 3 games, Diner Dash, Animal Crossing, and Guitar
..and the fact that this study presents something that people think of is obvious is the only reason it's getting news.
They only ran the test on 22 people, and all they did was play a single video game. How can they possibly draw any meaningful conclusions from that?
And how is the an issue with "the male brain" rather than, for example, "men living in America who have had previous exposure to video games." How can they be even a little sure that the entire history of guys liking games more than girls isn't cultural (I'm not saying that it is, btw. Just that this study does nothing to account for anything like that).
He might as well be basing his study on Phrenology, for all the science that he's putting into this.
I know that my videogame playing leads me to spend far more money than I would if I spent my time on a more constructive hobby. Anyone can become weak and do foolish things.
Kent Brockman:
The weather service has warned us to brace ourselves for the onslaught of Hurricane Barbara. And if you think naming a destructive storm after a woman is sexist, you obviously have never seen the gals grabbing for items at a clearance sale.
Marge:
Hrm... that's true... but he shouldn't say it.
It just goes along with how men are portrayed in most commercials and sitcoms as bumbling, sex starved idiots who have to be set straight but the level headed woman.
I'd agree. The majority of these things paints males as much closer to barbaric creatures. I see this (horribly insufficient) study and think "Wow, men are more likely to be able to relax and enjoy themselves, show an increased desire to deal with their mental issues responsibly, and have much higher coordination skills!" With the exception of perhaps reading, music, and exercise, there are few "addictions" that are as good for the mind as some video gaming can be - there's no reason to paint us as villa
The majority of these things paints males as much closer to barbaric creatures.
I see nothing wrong with that. I like being barbaric. I like to scratch my nuts when I first wake up in the morning. I like to just shrug it off when women talk about their feelings (Here's a clue, ladies. If you're not my wife, I don't give a flying fuck about your feelings). I like to eat leftover pizza for breakfast and wash it down with a colder beer. I like porn. I like loud, nasty rock 'n roll. I like sex and violence.
After I'm done with my day's work I like to fire up a game and beat the everlovi
I'm lucky enough to have a circle of friends, both male and female, who are highly attuned to this gender bias in advertising and equally adept at ignoring it. Couple that with the fact that none of us watch much TV and that most of us are aware that large numbers of people are still institutionally sexist and we usually just laugh and decide not to let it offend us. Not sure if the US gets it worse than we do in the UK (there's an inherent sample bias in that people bitching abotu it on/. are largely male
My girlfriend is JUST as addicted, if not MORE to the same games as I am. Oblivion and Black and White 2! It becomes a system of trade offs of who's playing what at what time...
It has more to do with the person then the gender! She can wale on me in UT and I make rockin' brownies.
I agree. I have trouble putting down the controller, but my gf is afraid of picking it up because she can't stop whatsoever until I snap her out of it.
I think it has to do with attention span. Those who love constant stimulation like my gf get a serious high from video games like the Sims where there is always things going on.
It's just bad science to use behavioural science [wikipedia.org] and attribute the findings to gender. You could, if you really wanted to stretch it, perhaps apply this to African American Males are more aggressive than their counter parts. We're seeing the Simpson principle at work and as others have pointed out, it may have been due to the games selected. I wonder how many of their male gamers would have been so inclined to addiction if it was "Barbie's Pony Adventure"
Totally bogus: a study of 11 males and 11 females is not nearly adequate to make any generalizations about the population. Five bucks say they were students in the researcher's class.
Title of the article: "Male brains wired for video game obsession"
That is VERY offensive. Men in the U.S. are the targets of an extreme
amount of hostility. I'm guessing that the person who wrote that headline knew
that being hostile toward men is in fashion, and wrote it to get attention for
the advertisements.
Quote: "These gender differences in the brain may help explain why
males are more attracted to, and more likely to become hooked on video games
than females," he said.
Fraud: He has not shown any gender differences in the brain. He
has shown that, at the time, those particular subjects were using their brains
differently.
The article does imply something useful about brains, however. The
fact that Slashdot editors wanted us to see it may be an indication that the
editors are not in touch with reality. Maybe that's because the editors spent
so much time playing games rather than trying to relate to reality.
If you want to experience a society where men aren't hated, go to
Brazil. However, don't fall in love with the first woman you meet, like many
of my acquaintances.
A: If you are male, and go to Brazil (and Thailand), you will begin to realize
that all your life in the U.S. you have been treated badly by women.
It's reasonably easy, for me anyway, to find women in the U.S. who are
personally very interesting and are responsible. They are often valuable
employees, for example. It is difficult to find a woman in the U.S. who I
would consider marriageable. My women friends say the men in the U.S. are just
as bad, and I have every reason to believe they are right, but ha
Both of you. Males aren't being persecuted. You have absolutely no fucking idea what it means to be persecuted, to be the target of outright hostility and to be the victim of discrimination. Well, not unless you're black or gay. I suspect you aren't, though. What I do suspect is that you love your women to be submissive, to accept the man as the head of the household, and to believe in serving him. This is your prerogative - if you find a woman who is like that, go for it.
The researchers found that while both men and women quickly picked up the game's concepts, the guys were somewhat more aggressive and successful at gaining "territory" on the screen.
As there are no further details on what the game actually encompassed, we can assume 'gaining territory' was the sole purpose of the game. Duh, men have a tendency (either because of nature or nurture) to be more aggressive, and if the purpose of the game is to be aggressive they will enjoy it more. Nearly all games cater to thi
I emailed the progenitor of the paper about the "kind of video game" issue. I posit that word jumble games and MMORPGs are the sort of games that are likely to addict women.
Please take your politically correct pronouncements elsewhere. I am a liberal, but also a science-minded person. I feel ashamed for all liberals when science is denounced when it might suggest that humans are not all equal in the ways liberals would like them to be. Sorry, but real science doesn't care how the world should be, it only cares how it is.
Why is it not controversial to investigate whether certain races are more prone to certain illnesses, but it is controversial to offer a drug that seems to have more health benefits to one race than another?
Well I'll answer my own question. Some of the concern is based on justified anger over past atrocities committed by people who called themselves 'scientists' (e.g. infecting blacks with Syphilis). But when that anger translates to 'In 2008 I won't accept a drug that is targeted for my race because it might be a plot to harm us', I think we're talking tinfoil hat time.
Why is it not controversial to suggest that one gender has more physical strength than another, but it is heresy to even wonder whether one gender might have more intelligence/compassion/aggression/addiction than the other?
My suspicion is that people get more sensitive when we're talking about the mind vs. the body, because then the subject is the core of who we are. Fine, we're all sensitive about that. But what justifies a knee-jerk reaction that this is just 'junk science'? As a scientist would say, prove it!
By the way, personal anecdotal evidence suggests that this study is on to something. I know that my son and I are certainly prone to being hooked on territorial/aggressive games, while my daughter and wife don't show such tendency. And this pattern extends to other people I know. This is not proof, just commentary.
I'd be more inclined to call it "junk science" because almost any attempt at a study of human behavior really is not going to be truly scientific at the end of the day. Humans are simply too diverse a group to be effectively measured by present scientific protocols, as you cannot say that this group of people is representative of all people and in this instance, you certainly can't say that 22 young adults represent 6 billion+ humans. Heck, you could collect a sample of a million people, run exhaustive test
Just because it's difficult to come up with a good experiment doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Many famous scientists of the past earned their fame by creating a brilliant experiment that nobody had thought of before. Just because you or I cannot think of a good test doesn't mean that it's not testable. While people can absolve themselves by citing some scientific report about their behavior, it would just be an excuse like any other. Conversely someone could become more aware of their nascent nature and t
This study isn't on to diddly. Males are more territorial/aggressive; you don't need a study with 22 subjects playing video games to tell you that.
If a study wanted to generalize about "men vs women" and how they respond to video games, you would need a larger sample of both genders than 11+11, at least several kinds of games (some designed by men, some designed by women), etc. You would also need to apply some sort of statistical analysis to the results (another reason why large sample siz
Some of the concern is based on justified anger over past atrocities committed by people who called themselves 'scientists' (e.g. infecting blacks with Syphilis).
Just so we're clear, the Tuskegee expiriments did not involve infecting black men with syphilis. I know it was a minor point in your post, but it was inaccurate, is a common mistake, and I think given it's historical significance it's important to get it right. The men already had syphilis, and when the study began there was no known cure for it. 15 years into the study penicillin was known to cure it, so there was no reason to continue the study other than to watch poor uneducated black men die, which they did, and furthermore the men were lied to to keep them from getting cured.
But the study did NOT involve infecting them men with the disease directly. In some ways that's worse, because the study seems to have started off as a good study by good scientists and then morphed somehow into preventing patients from getting cured entirely because of their race. An evil study like "let's infect black men with syphillis" is something only comic book villians will waste time doing. A good study eventually turning into evil, I don't know how that happens or how we would prevent that today.
Well, the IQ test regardless of race is controversial. On a recent Colbert Report a guest discussed how the IQ test is targeted for people within a certain environment and are not truely universal tests. He speculated that if someone like Lincoln were to take a modern IQ test he would quite possibly score less than 100 simply because people of his generation faced different problems and wouldn't have the needed experience to do well on the typical IQ test. Another example he gave was to show how a tribe in
In other news... (Score:2)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Questionable? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The Result... (Score:2)
Isn't it the other way around? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Isn't it the other way around? (Score:4, Funny)
I have a theory on why some women would enjoy a game that involves cutting a long snaky thing into pieces before it can get to them, but I'm not going to get into that here
Parent
Haven't found the games addictive for females? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't really study something so heavily biased and expect the bias to go away.
Try them on a game like Animal Crossing or Nintendogs or something and if guys are still more likely to get addicted than I'll buy the verdict.
For some anecdotal evidence one of my relatives is a total anti-gamer except for 3 games, Diner Dash, Animal Crossing, and Guitar
and in other news. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:and in other news. (Score:4, Insightful)
They only ran the test on 22 people, and all they did was play a single video game. How can they possibly draw any meaningful conclusions from that?
And how is the an issue with "the male brain" rather than, for example, "men living in America who have had previous exposure to video games." How can they be even a little sure that the entire history of guys liking games more than girls isn't cultural (I'm not saying that it is, btw. Just that this study does nothing to account for anything like that).
He might as well be basing his study on Phrenology, for all the science that he's putting into this.
Parent
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll wager (Score:2)
Or whatever they call themselves again.............
WOMEN! That's it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Kent Brockman: The weather service has warned us to brace ourselves for the onslaught of Hurricane Barbara. And if you think naming a destructive storm after a woman is sexist, you obviously have never seen the gals grabbing for items at a clearance sale.
Marge: Hrm... that's true... but he shouldn't say it.
Well, I think the conclusion is obvious (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
What is wrong with males' strengths (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is wrong with males' strengths (Score:5, Insightful)
It just goes along with how men are portrayed in most commercials and sitcoms as bumbling, sex starved idiots who have to be set straight but the level headed woman.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I like being a barbarian. (Score:3, Insightful)
The majority of these things paints males as much closer to barbaric creatures.
I see nothing wrong with that. I like being barbaric. I like to scratch my nuts when I first wake up in the morning. I like to just shrug it off when women talk about their feelings (Here's a clue, ladies. If you're not my wife, I don't give a flying fuck about your feelings). I like to eat leftover pizza for breakfast and wash it down with a colder beer. I like porn. I like loud, nasty rock 'n roll. I like sex and violence.
After I'm done with my day's work I like to fire up a game and beat the everlovi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I call bull! (Score:4, Insightful)
It has more to do with the person then the gender! She can wale on me in UT and I make rockin' brownies.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I call bull! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a second...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
GF + Sims = zombie (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it has to do with attention span. Those who love constant stimulation like my gf get a serious high from video games like the Sims where there is always things going on.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure? (Score:3, Funny)
Warning (Score:2)
Bogus science (Score:2)
Five bucks say they were students in the researcher's class.
Says more about Slashdot editors than brains. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is VERY offensive. Men in the U.S. are the targets of an extreme amount of hostility. I'm guessing that the person who wrote that headline knew that being hostile toward men is in fashion, and wrote it to get attention for the advertisements.
Quote: "These gender differences in the brain may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become hooked on video games than females," he said.
Fraud: He has not shown any gender differences in the brain. He has shown that, at the time, those particular subjects were using their brains differently.
The article does imply something useful about brains, however. The fact that Slashdot editors wanted us to see it may be an indication that the editors are not in touch with reality. Maybe that's because the editors spent so much time playing games rather than trying to relate to reality.
If you want to experience a society where men aren't hated, go to Brazil. However, don't fall in love with the first woman you meet, like many of my acquaintances.
Q: What's all this about Brazil? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's reasonably easy, for me anyway, to find women in the U.S. who are personally very interesting and are responsible. They are often valuable employees, for example. It is difficult to find a woman in the U.S. who I would consider marriageable. My women friends say the men in the U.S. are just as bad, and I have every reason to believe they are right, but ha
Give me a fucking break! (Score:3, Insightful)
What I do suspect is that you love your women to be submissive, to accept the man as the head of the household, and to believe in serving him. This is your prerogative - if you find a woman who is like that, go for it.
However, lack of submission has abso
It all depends... (Score:2)
As there are no further details on what the game actually encompassed, we can assume 'gaining territory' was the sole purpose of the game. Duh, men have a tendency (either because of nature or nurture) to be more aggressive, and if the purpose of the game is to be aggressive they will enjoy it more. Nearly all games cater to thi
Women + Shopping? (Score:2)
Female Brains are wired for...
Link to actual paper (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the actual paper: Hoeft_2008JPsychiatrRes.pdf [stanford.edu]
I emailed the progenitor of the paper about the "kind of video game" issue. I posit that word jumble games and MMORPGs are the sort of games that are likely to addict women.
If he ever writes back (unlikely), I'll post.
-l
Re:studies (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it not controversial to investigate whether certain races are more prone to certain illnesses, but it is controversial to offer a drug that seems to have more health benefits to one race than another?
Well I'll answer my own question. Some of the concern is based on justified anger over past atrocities committed by people who called themselves 'scientists' (e.g. infecting blacks with Syphilis). But when that anger translates to 'In 2008 I won't accept a drug that is targeted for my race because it might be a plot to harm us', I think we're talking tinfoil hat time.
Why is it not controversial to suggest that one gender has more physical strength than another, but it is heresy to even wonder whether one gender might have more intelligence/compassion/aggression/addiction than the other?
My suspicion is that people get more sensitive when we're talking about the mind vs. the body, because then the subject is the core of who we are. Fine, we're all sensitive about that. But what justifies a knee-jerk reaction that this is just 'junk science'? As a scientist would say, prove it!
By the way, personal anecdotal evidence suggests that this study is on to something. I know that my son and I are certainly prone to being hooked on territorial/aggressive games, while my daughter and wife don't show such tendency. And this pattern extends to other people I know. This is not proof, just commentary.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While people can absolve themselves by citing some scientific report about their behavior, it would just be an excuse like any other. Conversely someone could become more aware of their nascent nature and t
Re: (Score:2)
As a scientist would say, prove it!
No, not so much.
This study isn't on to diddly. Males are more territorial/aggressive; you don't need a study with 22 subjects playing video games to tell you that.
If a study wanted to generalize about "men vs women" and how they respond to video games, you would need a larger sample of both genders than 11+11, at least several kinds of games (some designed by men, some designed by women), etc. You would also need to apply some sort of statistical analysis to the results (another reason why large sample siz
Re:studies (Score:5, Informative)
Just so we're clear, the Tuskegee expiriments did not involve infecting black men with syphilis. I know it was a minor point in your post, but it was inaccurate, is a common mistake, and I think given it's historical significance it's important to get it right. The men already had syphilis, and when the study began there was no known cure for it. 15 years into the study penicillin was known to cure it, so there was no reason to continue the study other than to watch poor uneducated black men die, which they did, and furthermore the men were lied to to keep them from getting cured.
But the study did NOT involve infecting them men with the disease directly. In some ways that's worse, because the study seems to have started off as a good study by good scientists and then morphed somehow into preventing patients from getting cured entirely because of their race. An evil study like "let's infect black men with syphillis" is something only comic book villians will waste time doing. A good study eventually turning into evil, I don't know how that happens or how we would prevent that today.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)