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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

#191

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #145
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point for randomized trials, and much of modern statistics is to argue from ignorance. You hypothesize that maybe there's something missing, who knows. A causal boogey man. Then you design a test robust to that. One term for problems this leads to is omitted variable bias. It's not about "ooh maybe this one thing is bad." It's about "this class of problem is introduced." It's tough to make an intuitive stor…

Argument from ignorance is a specific kind of logical fallacy. It’s where you argue for something by saying, in effect, “we don’t know that it’s not true”. If a hypothesis leads you to test for something and collect (dis)confirming evidence, And your argument hinges on the evidence, then we aren’t arguing from ignorance.

It seems like you're saying "this is weak methodology" is a fallacy. It's open to all sorts of errors, but since we don't know that any of the errors are really the case, so we shouldn't argue that it's bad evidence? We aren't arguing boolean true/false, but strength of evidence.

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

#192

Post by einpoklum »

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…

You're proving my point. There is a list - longer than this one of course, but a very finite list - of examples. You wouldn't think of listing the playable _male_ characters in games, because those would be, well, almost all characters in all games.

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

#193

Post by sudosteph »

asjw wrote: post #160
sudosteph wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really see it. Hunting for survival and social game-playing to pass the time and hang out with people are different motivators. Game playing as a social activity has existed in many different cultures throughout history. Think about the popularity of simple dice and card games as recreational social activities throughout history. Most people who played those games didn't care about the game itself, it was just something to do with people and maybe they would win and get a bit of a thrill (or some cash when a gambling element was attached).

So if the theory is that men just like games themselves, and that the social element is not a big factor in frequent game playing - then better comparison then would be to compare gambling habits between male and females. One study showed that among people with gambling problems, men were more likely to participate in sports betting, poker, and casino games - all games with a high social element and where it's possible to have a network of regulars you befriend and play with (and which in most casinos I've been to, those games have a social environment that is male-dominant). Meanwhile, women gambling addicts were more likely to be use single-player machines (poker/blackjack machines, slots) while gambling [1], which seems to indicate they are more likely addicted to the games themselves and rush of winning. I could be missing something and maybe women like go out playing with a group of friends and chat while playing - but every time I see people playing video gambling, they usually seem pretty enthralled with their machine.

But then there's also a big difference in the number of women who gamble and rate of addiction to gambling between men and women (with men more likely to play and be addicted in the first place). So again, I'm not disputing that there are differences and that some men are genuinely just obssesed with games themselves - but I do think that the social network factor and "stickiness" factor of that social network is hugely important to understanding why many guys spend such a disproportionate amount of time playing video games vs social media or other social activities, and why it's not necessarily so different from other social activities.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1080/14459795.2018.1495750

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

#194

Post by solidsnack9000 »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #191
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argument from ignorance is a specific kind of logical fallacy. It’s where you argue for something by saying, in effect, “we don’t know that it’s not true”. If a hypothesis leads you to test for something and collect (dis)confirming evidence, And your argument hinges on the evidence, then we aren’t arguing from ignorance.

It seems like you're saying "this is weak methodology" is a fallacy. It's open to all sorts of errors, but since we don't know that any of the errors are really the case, so we shouldn't argue that it's bad evidence? We aren't arguing boolean true/false, but strength of evidence.

There are many ways to argue for something like "this is weak methodology" and some of them are fallacies. Some of them aren't.

A good argument against a study's methodology would probably talk a lot more about the methodology, and a lot less about a believable alternative narrative that is supported by the study. The latter strategy is accepting of the methodology because it is granting that the observed effect is real and deserving of explanation. In a different light, the earlier comment ("As an example of how the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature...") is kind of weird because it is as though the effect might as well be due to nature -- it would present the same way and be as consistent and robust -- even if it were due to socialisation.

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

#195

Post by NoodleIncident »

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…

This comment was never meant to be anything more than "story time". Logically, I know that this study doesn't prove any genetic difference in how men and women interact with video games. However, my monkey brain wasn't satisfied with "well there could be some other reason"; so I put together a neat little narrative, to represent a single point in that entire probability space. It took some effort to come up with this narrative, and the thread didn't have any good comments at the time, so I decided to post it.

If you do think that this study proves a genetic difference between how men and women, then one of us is wrong about what an experiment like this can "prove". (I don't think it's quite "correlation != causation", but it's along those lines; I don't have the vocabulary to precisely say why I think that position is wrong.) If that is your position, then maybe this one counterexample will be enough to change your view; it should be, even though that was never my intent. Maybe I've drastically misread your comment and you don't believe anything of the sort. If so, I'm sorry.

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

#197

Post by freeflight »

JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #157
freeflight wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat is more of the norm.

For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how communities organized back then: Around clans and servers.

Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, participate to this day without ever fully going "pro" because there's a pretty massive middle ground between "absolutely casual gaming" and "sponsored organized pro gaming".

> For console games like COD, most causal games I played few people had mics.

Did you actually play with friends? There's a reason "party chat" features like Xbox Live Party were heavily demanded for many years.

> 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.

That's completely opposite to my experience in vanilla Wow: Organizing and managing 40 man raids without voice chat was pretty much impossible.

Just like daily guild live mostly happened on a voice chat server, where people would hang out even when they were not playing.

> 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.

If you define voice chat as solely "voice chat interactions with randoms in public rounds" then maybe yes, but your mileage will vary vastly depending on the platform and genre.

Discord also isn't "beyond a voice chat for gaming", it's pretty much just the modern manifestation of server centered communities like they used to be a thing with CS game servers and still are a thing to this day with "Clan TS2 servers", Discord is just a natural evolution of those where people don't have to pay rent/bandwidth for a server.

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

#198

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

freeflight wrote: post #197
JakeTheAndroid wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat is more of the norm. For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how communities organized back then: Around clans and servers. Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, participate to this day without ever f…

> For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how communities organized back then: Around clans and servers.

CS is not new, but it's one game. And even within this one game, many people do not have mics. Most people don't play exclusively with pre-mades they play pugs. Either via MM or Faceit (and to a lesser extent these days, ESEA). If you pug you'll find most people don't use mics at all.

> Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, participate to this day without ever fully going "pro" because there's a pretty massive middle ground between "absolutely casual gaming" and "sponsored organized pro gaming".

Most people don't play in clans or pre-mades like I said before. Yes, the move visible players do use voice chat, and at the highest levels it's uncommon for people to not use it. But a bulk of players in CS do not fall into these categories whatsoever. The average ranking is Gold Nova-ish which is far from the top end of the player base.

> Did you actually play with friends? There's a reason "party chat" features like Xbox Live Party were heavily demanded for many years.

Yes, I played in a clan starting in MW2 - BO2 or MW3 (I forget which came out last) and plenty of my clan members didn't have mics during clan events, let alone just playing random games. This was on Playstation Network, so maybe Xbox players used this way more, I can't speak to that.

> That's completely opposite to my experience in vanilla Wow: Organizing and managing 40 man raids without voice chat was pretty much impossible.

I guess this depends on how dedicated your groups were. We had 40 people in voice chat, but really only the party leaders regularly had mics in Vent or TS. This was enough to organize and successfully raid. But I guess YMMV here. All other MMOs I've played voice chat was essentially non-existent and you chatted with random people more often anyways since you didn't need pre-made parties or your guild to do most of the events. Using MapleStory (since I played the shit out of that) Party Quests were almost always just randoms in channel 1 not your friends. This echos the experiences I had playing Eve and Rift when that came out.

> Discord also isn't "beyond a voice chat for gaming", it's pretty much just the modern manifestation of server centered communities like they used to be a thing with CS game servers and still are a thing to this day with "Clan TS2 servers", Discord is just a natural evolution of those where people don't have to pay rent/bandwidth for a server.

Discord isn't used exclusively for in game chat in my experience. I'm part of plenty of communities on discord that have nothing to do with gaming, and even the gaming communities don't focus around chatting while gaming. They are usually to keep up with whatever the community is focused on, be it a streamers Discord or whatever. I'm not saying that Discord isn't used similar to TS or Ventrilo but it's beyond what those services did, and they aren't dedicated to just voice chatting with your group. It's a far more versatile service.

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

#199

Post by solidsnack9000 »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #195
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment was never meant to be anything more than "story time". Logically, I know that this study doesn't prove any genetic difference in how men and women interact with video games. However, my monkey brain wasn't satisfied with "well there could be some other reason"; so I put together a neat little narrative, to represent a single point in that entire probability space. It took some effort to come up with this…

You say that you "know" that "that this study doesn't prove any genetic difference in how men and women interact with video games." That is a really strong statement, which you offer without support. How do you know that?

What if we asked whether this study "supports" such a difference instead of "proves" it? Would you still say you know it doesn't support it?

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