To virtually no one’s surprise, the obsessive passion of men who play video games comes from the male need to dominate. This is the conclusion of a study done at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research.

Professor Allan Reiss of the Center, which is located at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, the scientist that led the research, said that his study showed that women understood computer games just as well as men but did not have the same neurological drive for domination. Professor Reiss says, “These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become ‘hooked’ on video games than females.”

Reiss goes on to say, “I think it’s fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species – they’re the males. Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory and aggression-type games.” His remarks came in a story in the London Telegraph.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. The researched connected both men and women to an MRI scanner while they played a competitive video game. The game involved an attempt to win on-screen territory by clicking on a series of target balls. When the MRI data was analyzed, it showed that the brain’s mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction, was stimulated during the game. The male brain, however, showed much more stimulation than the female brain during the game. And, in the male brain, the rate of stimulation increased as more territory was won.

This would certainly help to explain why so many more men than women are obsessively involved in computer game playing. The need of males to dominate is providing a pleasure feedback loop as they compete, using the brain’s nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex reward circuits. Obviously, for the male of the species, it feels very good indeed to dominate.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 4:41 pm under Health, Science and technology.

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