Note: The following article is from my Issue 021: August 2008 Playstation® Official Magazine - UK, Page 023.
Why men need to conquer, but women aren't so fussed
Scientists may have discovered the reason why gaming remains a male dominated activity - and it's all about brain chemistry. In a surely valuable and in no way likely to cause massive rows piece of research by Prof Allan Reiss of Stanford University, male and female participants were hooked up to an MRI scanner while playing a strategy game in which the implicit aim was to win as much territory as possible, by clicking on balls before they hit centrally placed wall. Guess what happened...
All in the mind
In both sexes victory stimulated the brain's mesocorticolimbic centre, usually associated with reward and addiction. However, with the male subjects the activity was much more pronounced, and motivation grew as they gained more territory. Women understood the game and knew how to win, but their pleasure centres remained comparatively unmoved.
"I think it is fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial," said Reiss of his findings, hinting that games appeal to a primal male instinct for conquest. In his report for the Journal of Psychiatric Research, Reiss goes on to suggest, "These gender differences might help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on, videogames than females." In other words, lads, it's not our fault we spend night after night hitting Liberty City [the city in which the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV takes place in] for cheap thrills, we're powerless slaves to our mesocorticolimbic overlords.
We spoke to one of the research team, Fumiko Hoeft, who told us they're planning further work in this area, including repeating the experiment using different types of game and more complex simulations, "that interrogate territoriality." In other words, why do men care about dominating virtual landscapes?
Based on our own experience, the research team is likely to get very different results from the female participants if they use a copy of SingStar Legends and a couple bottles of Rosé. Next month: why boys like guns and cars.
Want to find out more about your game-obsessed brain? Read the full report at snipurl.com/2e33a.
A little scientific advice from the scientists:
Note: The following article is from my Issue 021: August 2008 Playstation® Official Magazine - UK, Page 023.
Bet on red
Next time you're heading online for a frag-fest make sure you get on the red team. Scientists at the University of Copenhagen recently studied 1,347 bouts of online UT 2004 and found that red teams won 55% of the time. Neuroscientist Mihai Moldovan reckons this is all to do with red being a psychological distractor for men because it symbolises anger. Blue on the other hand probably just means depression. Or shame. No one is scared of shooting at those.
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