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The article claims that inside games "most communication is through text". This makes me think they haven't seen very many real gamers. There's no mention of voice chat's extensive use inside games for everything from gameplay to homework advice from buddies. Pretty clueless.
All of the games I played as a kid were clearly designed for boys and young men (featuring all of the typical things like guns and heavy machinery that men are well known to like more than women). That's just how the market was. If it's like that today, then it is no wonder that boys exhibit signs of enjoying video games more.
These studies don’t claim to say anything deeper about either gender's innate predisposition towards certain behaviours, only that the populations they studied behave in particular ways.
The data should be used to focus efforts in things like, for example, preventing online gaming addiction or preventing feelings of inadequacy from using social media, but I think it's folly to extrapolate the findings to make any larger scale statements on society at large.
All of the games I played as a kid were clearly designed for boys and young men (featuring all of the typical things like guns and heavy machinery that men are well known to like more than women). That's just how the market was. If it's like that today, then it is no wonder that boys exhibit signs of enjoying video games more.
I was particularly interested in the participant selection section; they did go to an effort to select male and female participants with similar gaming habits. However, this doesn't mean that the only explanation for the different "craving" response is a fundamental difference between men and women. Just because you end up with a similar population with similar habits, doesn't mean that the path those individuals traveled to get there is the same.
As an example of how the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature, suppose that across all young boys and girls, there is a subset of people that are predisposed to addiction. Also suppose that in many cases, an addiction can begin the first time you're exposed to something. Even if both boys and girls were equally predisposed to become addicted to both video games and social media, they would not be equally likely to be exposed to those two addictive digital activities. It would be more likely that a boy's friends would introduce him to video games, and that a girl's friends would introduce her to social media. Once they are addicted to one or the other, they will spend more time on that activity, and will be unlikely to explore the opposite.
Eventually, these hypothetical boys and girls grow up, and our hypothetical scientists select participants for their version of this fMRI experiment. They do a good job selecting male and female participants who play games for similar numbers of hours, but the potential female video game addicts in this universe are much less likely to ever start playing games, before getting addicted to something else. Since these hypothetical people have selected themselves out of this hypothetical study, they discover a difference in fMRI responses to images of video games that's correlated with gender, but still 100% caused by existing gender roles and stereotypes.
All of the games I played as a kid were clearly designed for boys and young men (featuring all of the typical things like guns and heavy machinery that men are well known to like more than women). That's just how the market was. If it's like that today, then it is no wonder that boys exhibit signs of enjoying video games more.
There are plenty of games "for girls" (the hidden-object and life-simulation genres are almost exclusively consumed by women, regardless of theming) but they're not marketed with quite the high-budget superbowl ad-campaign effort that games "for boys" are. I've encountered the situation many times where I'll find out one of my female friends doesn't play video games. I'll ask why, and—disregarding the people who just…
¹https://mediakix.com/blog/mobile-gaming-industry-statistics-...
Aren't the majority of gamers female anyway? [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-per...
Also, going on about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
All of the games I played as a kid were clearly designed for boys and young men (featuring all of the typical things like guns and heavy machinery that men are well known to like more than women). That's just how the market was. If it's like that today, then it is no wonder that boys exhibit signs of enjoying video games more.
There are plenty of games "for girls" (the hidden-object and life-simulation genres are almost exclusively consumed by women, regardless of theming) but they're not marketed with quite the high-budget superbowl ad-campaign effort that games "for boys" are. I've encountered the situation many times where I'll find out one of my female friends doesn't play video games. I'll ask why, and—disregarding the people who just…
Aren't the majority of gamers female anyway? [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-per...
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Also, going on about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.