Gamertell

According to an
imaging study conducted by the Stanford University School of Medicine, men are more liable to get rewarding feelings from videogames than women. This may help explain why males are more likely to become hooked on videogames than females.

The study involved 22 young adults, 11 men and 11 women, playing a simple 24-second game multiple times.  They were wired to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which shows the parts of the brain being used during each activity. 

They were not told every aspect of the gameplay, but both genders figured out the complete object of the game roughly after the same amount of time.  The men, however, were much more successful in playing the game.

Analysis of the data showed significant activity in the mesocorticolimbic centers (associated with reward and addiction) of all the subjects’ brains.  But the men’s mesocorticolimbic centers were more active than the women’s, and the men who had the greatest success at the game had the most active centers, whereas there was no correlation between success and mesocorticolimbic activity for the females. 

Allan Reiss, a Stanford professor of Psychiatry and Behaviorial Sciences and a senior author of the study, originally got the idea from his 2005 study of gender differences where he discovered that males and females process humor differently.

What this really means is that if you’re not completely and utterly motivated to get the Cuddling Achievement in the XBox 360 version of The Darkness, you’re not a real man.

Read [ScienceDaily]  Also Read [Joystiq]