Gender and gaming is a fascinating topic. As part of the Lady Geek project Belinda Palmer looked the retail experience surrounding gaming. More can be found here.
I recently read an article in Psychological Science dealing with that topic. The article reported on an experiment in which people had to spot the ‘odd one out’. Like previous research, this study showed a sex difference with men having a higher success rate (68%) than women (55%).
This seems to be pretty much in line with the belief about spatial tasks in which men are said to perform better than women. For instance women are slower and make more mistakes when mentally rotating objects. However this is not the case for women trained in the natural sciences who are as good as men in these areas. It is also notable that women and men use different strategies to navigate. Men prefer maps while women navigate based on landmarks, which means that it may be rather a question of how good navigation is assessed and which way of assessing this skill is accepted as norm.
Returning to this study, the researchers could have left it at this having confirmed a gender stereotype. What they did instead was to let them play video games. One group played a video game called ‘Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault’ while the other group played ‘Balance’, a non-action puzzle game. While the latter group did not improve their performance, the ones who played ‘Medal of Honor’ did much better in the spatial task test. What was staggering was that women improved their performance more than men and that the sex differences found earlier vanished altogether. These effects were the same when people were tested again after five months.
As biologists and neuroscientists point out our brains are shaped by genes but also by upbringing. The different games girls and boys play may have to do with different brain structures developing. The social construction that boys play violent games and girls non-action games might in conclusion lead to the expression of greater sex differences in spatial tasks. The fact that women are confined to have dirty little secrets when playing video games, is a way in which gender stereotypes are reiterated and re-enacted.
