Video games stimulate 'conqueror' feelings in men

Men are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on, video games than women

Scientists have discovered that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.

The idea may explain why men tend to like video games more than their female counterparts.

Allan Reiss MD and his colleagues at Stanford University studied a group of 11 young men and 11 young women playing numerous 24-second intervals of a specially designed game.

The game involved players clicking balls on the screen in a particular sequence in order to gain territory.

The participants were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine which monitors those parts of the brain which are active during a given task.

"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on, video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper.

After analysing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain's mesocorticolimbic centre, the region typically associated with reward and addiction.

However, the males showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained in the game, which was not the case with the female players.

Deeper analysis of the three structures within the reward circuit (the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) were also shown to influence each other much more in men than in women.

Furthermore, the better connected this circuit, the better the males performed in the game.

The findings, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, appear to indicate that successfully acquiring territory in a computer game is more rewarding for men than for women.

"I think it is fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial," said Reiss. "It does not take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species. They are the males. "

The research also suggests that males have neural circuitry that makes them more liable than women to feel rewarded by a computer game with a territorial component, and more motivated to continue game-playing behaviour.

"Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory and aggression type games," he said.

Reiss believes that the findings may apply to other types of computer game, and that he and his colleagues are planning further work in this area.