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Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

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Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#151

Post by atroche »

jacobolus wrote: post #130
numismatex wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially in communities. For ease, people lump things such as social media and gaming in with "addiction". I'm sure 100 years from now in many cases the "social media addicts" will have a subset that leans toward success beyond their local community, and the gamers have a longer life expectancy than many in their community. I'd rather my kid game than go outside even in our middle-class neighborhood. I'd rather hav…

> I'd rather my kid game than go outside even in our middle-class neighborhood. I'd rather have my kid keep in touch with friends via social media than having them all in my kitchen when I'm not home. What? You don’t allow your kid to go outside or hang out with friends face to face? You prefer his/her social interactions are all intermediated by a computer network? This seems like a very strange and dystopian prefer…

I also have very different ideas about what I'd want for my hypothetical kids than the OP, but preferring one thing isn't the same as disallowing the other.

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#152

Post by atroche »

esyir wrote: post #138
throwaway010718 wrote: post #136

Imagine if this headline read "Research on drunks' preference for aggressiveness and sobers' for politeness". Would anyone argue that nurture and societal norms is the reason drunks behave more aggressively ? As someone who has been drunk on testosterone most of their life, I can testify it is a powerful and fun drug. Perhaps if research was framed in terms of hormonal differences rather than sex differences it would…

It shouldn't be controversial at all. There are sex differences. A good chunk of those differences are the effect of hormonal differences that stem from sexual dimorphism that in turn likely stem from some other evolutionary selection process. Does culture play a role in behavior? Probably. But is there an inherent difference between the sexes? Yes.

Finding out which things are more affected by culture is still interesting and worthwhile.

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#153

Post by esyir »

atroche wrote: post #152
esyir wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be controversial at all. There are sex differences. A good chunk of those differences are the effect of hormonal differences that stem from sexual dimorphism that in turn likely stem from some other evolutionary selection process. Does culture play a role in behavior? Probably. But is there an inherent difference between the sexes? Yes.

Finding out which things are more affected by culture is still interesting and worthwhile.

Sure, but that's the point. Paraphrasing brodo's reply, anyone who says outcomes here are all culture or all nature is full of it. However, we've swung all the way to the other end where to imply that nature might play a role in outcomes here is grounds for excommunication from many circles (see Damore and Empathizing–systemizing theory).

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#154

Post by cm2187 »

brodo wrote: post #149
esyir wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be controversial at all. There are sex differences. A good chunk of those differences are the effect of hormonal differences that stem from sexual dimorphism that in turn likely stem from some other evolutionary selection process. Does culture play a role in behavior? Probably. But is there an inherent difference between the sexes? Yes.

In the nature vs nurture debate, every time someone argues for all nature or all nurture it’s an ideological position. That biology has no influence on behavior is as absurd as that society has none. The division into nature and nurture is also not as clean-cut as people think it is. There are many things in human culture that are that way because of biology and our culture influences our biology over the long run.

Plus unless the person arguing is a biologist backed by some hard evidence, it is only ideology talking.

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#155

Post by belorn »

satokema wrote: post #76
chrisco255 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you? You telling me you got no innate enjoyment out of those activities? No rush or thrill when you scored a goal or caught a pop fly?

You would have to score a goal or catch a pop fly in order to experience those things. My attempts at team sports when young were full of experiences of being insufficent and bullying or ostracism by the more athletic team members. So I didn't ask to go back and didn't join them later on for school teams, and had minimal interest in even observing them. Learning the rulesets was fine, I can follow an american footbal…

A bit tangential to that comment, there is a fascinating biological aspect to watching and caring about sport.

When people gain social status they produce more hormones which regulates how much effort is spent on defending social status. When a person win in a competition like sport their hormone rises. The interesting part is that for sport fans, their bodies also react just as they have gain status. The body mimic what it perceive as an extension of itself.

This explain a finding that in sport riots it is usually the winning side that "starts" the fight, through a more fair description is that the winning side reacts more extremely when they perceive to be challenged.

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#156

Post by belorn »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #77
NoodleIncident wrote: post #66

Here is one of the actual studies, which is much less annoying to read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234325/?mod=ar... 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 betwee…

This argument is superficially compelling but I fear that it is ultimately argument from ignorance. It is true that we don’t know everything. You even offer a fairly elaborate example of something that we don’t know whether it happened or not. It could be true. The problem here is that you offer no evidence to support whether it is true or not. Now it’s story time and instead of evaluating the studies and working wit…

A common critique in all behavioral science is that most of it can be distilled down into telling the better story through weak or nonexistent evidence, and thus the only "real" way to conduct science into behavior is to use more hard evidence like genetics, neuroscience or even more concrete such as fossil records.

The problem is that the probability to finding a "gaming" gene, one that only exist or be expressed in males, would be very unlikely.

Robert Sapolsky has a good description of this in his lecture series "Human Behavioral Biology" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...).

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#157

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

freeflight wrote: post #122
charliesharding wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In higher level competitive scenarios, yeah voice is predominant. However, that is by no means the majority. They only seem like a bigger segment of gamers because they're loud and make themselves known. All they said was that most is done through text, which is true

Even nearly 20 years ago I was hanging out daily on voice chat servers with my Counter-Strike buddies. It wasn't just for coordination in-game, just hanging out and talking while sometimes not even playing, because that's what even male friends do: They talk. It's even more dominant with consoles where since the 360/PS3 era voice has also seen quite high adoption rates even more common than in PC gaming. Then there's…

Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat is more of the norm. Whats funny is that I still to this day get stuck in pugs with half the team not having mics. For console games like COD, most causal games I played few people had mics. But what we are talking about is competitive games more or less which does generally get more attention than Viva Piñata or something like that. And, if you look at something like LoL or Dota2 voice chat is either non-existent or no one uses it. I have ran into so few people using their mics in Dota2 and that is a competitive game. Instead people ping or type in chat.

When I played MMORPGs, which I think we can all agree are pretty popular, very few people had mics. For WoW people would connect to Vent but most didn't have a mic. It was useful for raids, but most of the time communication was via text chat. When playing MapleStory I would sit on Vent with my friends who often played on entirely different servers and no one on that game actually used Vent or TS regularly as part of their daily grind, it was almost exclusively chat.

So, I think the assertion that voice chat is a minority is probably correct. And like you said Discord is beyond a voice chat for gaming. I am in plenty of Discord channels and I have never once entered into a voice chat with anyone. It's a community chat room that happens to offer a voice chat option. Plenty of people use voice chat while gaming, but I don't think it's by and large the majority.

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#158

Post by slavik81 »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #108
einpoklum wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly IMHO, they were designed with male protagonists, and few-if-any playable female characters.

> few-if-any playable female characters * Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark) * Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) * Sarah Kerrigan (Starcraft) * Sonya (Command & Conquer) * Samas Aran (Metroid) * Sonya Blade (Mortal Kombat) * Chung-li (Street Fighter) * Jill (of the Jungle) Those are ones I can name without Googling from games before 2000. If you think there haven't been female playable characters in video games, you weren't paying at…

> Sonya (Command & Conquer)

You mean Tanya? Cha-ching!

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#159

Post by ivanhoe »

IMHO a big part of "controversy" surrounding the idea of purely biological male vs. female predispositions comes from people not really understanding how statistics work. People feel that results like this are somehow limiting to them individually so they argue emotionally against it, but statistics don't really deal with the individual outcomes. Statistical researches are never about you, me or any single individual. Just because on average sexes seem to prefer different things doesn't mean that every and single person of that sex has to feel that way, there will always be a spectrum of different results on the individual level. It's like saying that males are taller than females, that doesn't imply that there's no short men, or very tall women, we all know that there's a lot of them.

Now, that said, I personally don't buy neither just "everything is predefined by biology", nor the "the society shapes everything" positions, both seem like crude over-simplifications.

Re: Brain research on boys’ preference for video games and girls’ for social media

#160

Post by asjw »

sudosteph wrote: post #135
Vrondi wrote: post #5

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.

Agreed. Gaming-oriented discords (or their predecessors, mumble, teamspeak, skype) are often a social networks of their own - complete with the social drama that often comes with social networks. I love games, but I've never felt comfortable in any gaming group due to the fact that being female in one of those groups almost always means you end up getting a special sort of attention or making others uncomfortable by…

Hunting had a social aspect too.

But it wasn't a social activity. Just like gaming, it's gaming the majority of the time.

Social activities have parts that are similar to gaming, like when a group of friends ends up playing beer pong. But it's a social activity, not gaming.

And that's where we make the distinction.

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