No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games

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I thought ancient humans lured mastodons into a camouflaged hole in the ground with spikes at bottom, and that’s why sexism is so damn treacherous and insidious :smiley:

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Not quite; I have cited several studies and it turns out you don’t like that data. It’s ok, my data set can beat up your data set is how science works. Also, it feels like we’re fighting now with our little data armies and I am totally into that because I am a dude. Best game ever!

Could use a few more decapitations, gratuitous fatalities, people being ripped in half with viscera spraying all over the screen, though.

Look at the actual numbers. Most people won’t commit a single murder in their lives. No need for a hyperbolic yapping.

Not quite. You cited a study of belligerence in 17-month old children and claimed it as evidence that biology explains why 90% of murders are committed by men. You don’t actually have evidence for what you claim to have evidence for. The only rational reaction to your non-evidence is to presume you’re full of obfuscating bullshit.

So you understand it isn’t your gender. Great.

So men being naturally belligerent might not actually contribute to murder?

That was my point all along, thank you.

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I actually haven’t played Ultima 7 yet. The inventory management looks hilarious. I’ll try giving it a whirl. In other news I’m super excited that mount and blade is getting a proper sequel.

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It is in my gender, because I was born male and thus pumped full of testosterone, which predisposes a human to higher levels of belligerence and violence.

http://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Abstract/1997/09000/Age,_Testosterone,_and_Behavior_Among_Female.3.aspx

Conclusion: Testosterone is related to criminal violence and aggressive dominance in prison among women, as has been reported among men. Changes in these behaviors with age are in part explained by a decline in testosterone levels.

Or

Salivary testosterone and cortisol among late adolescent male offenders | Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology

Offenders high in testosterone committed more violent crimes, were judged more harshly by the parole board, and violated prison rules more often than those low in testosterone

Or

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988900888

Free testosterone concentrations were measured in the saliva of 84 female inmates and 15 female college students. Testosterone differed among inmates convicted of unprovoked violence, defensive violence, theft, drugs, and a set of other crimes. It was highest with unprovoked violence and lowest with defensive violence, where inmates had reacted violently after being physically assaulted. Testosterone was also related to number of prior charges and to Parole Board decisions about length of time to serve before being released on parole

I am sure you will be along shortly to hand wave all this pesky data and science away.

Gender is not destiny, not by a long shot, but I will continue to go on record maintaining that testosterone and estrogen are both a hell of a drug.

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I don’t disagree with you there. Saying this is sensible, supportable, and reasonable. I’m not disputing this point.

What I’m disputing is that that 90% of murders are committed by men because of their testosterone. Or that women don’t seek out video game dev jobs because of their estrogen. You can’t use estrogen and testosterone as an excuse for social behavior. Does it help explain it? Yeah, somewhat. Is it the primary cause and explanation? HELL FUCKING NO it isn’t, and to pretend otherwise is to imagine a world much more simplistic than the one we actually live in.

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I would never say that women don’t seek jobs of any kind because of estrogen.

I only maintain that testosterone drives men to higher levels of aggression – and that men disproportionately seek out fights and combat and guns and all that related action movie stuff because of it. (And yes I do think higher levels of aggression will lead to more confrontations that escalate to, eventually and in some rare cases, even homicide. No, I cannot prove this is directly the case, but why don’t more women commit homicides? Even at a 70/30 rate? Why is the gender difference so stark here?)

Edit: also implied here, although I should have been clearer about it, is that I think higher levels of aggression is BAD. An artifact of ancient caveman brains we don’t need in modern society. As an sublimated outlet for violent videogames it’s OK, but the world would in many ways be a be a better place if men were not biologically wired to be quite so aggressive all the time.

I honestly don’t see any downside to estrogen, personally.

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Are you sure you don’t mean toxoplasma gondii and not testosterone?


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Well what sold me is I get to wear armor. After getting my endorsement I kinda realized I didn’t ride a bicycle a lot for the exercise. But yeah having taken care of kitties for quite a bit of my life it may be a factor as well though I never had the desire to go crazy fast on the motorcycle.

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One thing also bugging me about the article is this whole “games must grow up vibe” (kinda implicit in this piece, explicit elsewhere and in comments, see quote above for example)

It reminds me of a certain ex
He was a movie buff of the highbrow “culture-critical” art-house variety, with pretentious notions of “grown up cinema” as opposed to “scifi”,“horror” and “blockbuster” “nonsense” (not the reason we parted. Okay, maybe :wink: one of several reasons we parted).

I am… not partial to this notion of growing up. Don’t get me wrong - arthouse fans are people and there’s nothing bad about them having their own niche in games, cinema, etc., but I find their notion of “grown up” to be completely unworkable and baseless.
There’s nothing “grown up” about “artsy”, pretentious cinema, and nothing “grown up” about games with similar aesthetics and narrative.
Just a niche like all others. I would appreciate if fans of this niche recognized that and stopped pretending their favorite narratives are somehow better than my favorite narratives.

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The evidence on that is more complex than you may presume, and in any case the chemical doesn’t remove the capacity for actual thought and decision-making.

Chemicals don’t explain human behavior cleanly or clearly.

Literally begging the question.

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If people frame everything as being narratives, and the main differences are merely aesthetics, then sure - we would be discussing only so many pissing contests.

But I would argue that framing the world in simplistic narratives, and celebrating simplistic solutions to real-world problems tends to encourage faulty and inaccurate thinking. Consider that many gamers claim to desire greater “realism” in games, so making them too reductive and crude does not make them a failure only by my standards. Games are simulations, and this is the level where there degree of realism lies, rather than their superficial appearance.

The ability to model and solve problems has functional, as well as aesthetic considerations.

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It kind of reminds me of Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
I doubt that people draw real-world solutions from their gaming experiences, at least not in any direct manner (otherwise, we would see correlations between ultraviolent games and actual violence, as well as various utterly mind-bending social effects from more “surrealistic” popular games like Mario or that Katamari thing :wink: and we don’t see anything of the kind)

But not too “realistic” - Quake mods that semi-accurately simulated blood loss and bone fractures were utter failure.
And different gamers have different preferences wrt realism (consider: any “army” shooter VS Serious Sam), not necessarily exclusive (some can enjoy both “realistic” and “more playful” game mechanics)

I think “realism” preferences in gaming simulations are just conspicuous aesthetic preference type specific to gaming, not unlike “hardness” preference in sci-fi (“hard” sci-fi is still, well, fiction, but apparently some people find suspension of disbelief easier and more enjoyable when most of the in-world science and math “checks out”, while others don’t care)

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Yeah, well, I was a C-64/Atari 2600 girl gamer, and I had boys literally snatch the controller out of my hands and tell me girls couldn’t possibly be good at games, so I should just go away and let them hog the console.

In other news, assholes may be found in both genders.

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Long Live The Queen?

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Where do they hide the bodies then?

They don’t, but they can help explain why certain groups show statistically significant behavioural patterns. They don’t excuse them or show that there was nothing else that the person could have done, but they do provide evidence for the claim that we are affected by the makeup of our physical bodies in a complex way, and aren’t just ‘free spirits’. For example:

**Behavior and personality
Testosterone levels play a major role in risk-taking during financial decisions.

A man with high testosterone has as much of a choice in financial decisions as a woman does, but it might be worth remembering that the gut instinct to take a risk may be biological, and may not be an accurate picture of reality. There may be other reasons for this difference (financial risks may actually be bigger for women, e.g. choosing a high-risk, high-reward career path may not seem as attractive if you think you are likely to be passed over and therefore miss out on potential rewards), but where it’s fairly consistently seen to have an effect on things like sexual arousal, risk taking and aggression (in positive and negative ways), it’s not surprising that you do see those things at a statistically significant level.

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BWAHAHAHAHA

I am a Canadian woman. Please look up what “hoser” means.

Just because as a nation we come across as “even-tempered” (which I’m not so sure about) doesn’t mean every last individual is. We have plenty of jerks, both men and women. Remember Rob Ford?

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