Gender Bias

Gamers with Jobs has an interesting editorial up debunking one of those studies that has concluded men are more apt to become addicted to gaming.

“The females ‘got’ the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect,” said Reiss, who is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. “They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed.”

This strikes me as a rather unscientific conclusion to draw. First off, I have a problem generally with small sample size studies. Yes, I understand that a carefully constructed small sample can have huge statistical significance. But even though I understand confidence intervals and Z-scores, I can’t get around the fact that we are talking about 22 people here. How were they selected? How many of them play games on a regular basis? I can guarantee you that if I sit a non-gamer down with a “generic” reaction-time and mouse-accuracy game next to one of the Gamers With Jobs crazy-good Team Fortress 2 players, the non-gamer is just along for the ride.
(…)
The findings indicate, the researchers said, that successfully acquiring territory in a computer game format is more rewarding for men than for women. And Reiss, for one, isn’t surprised. “I think it’s fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial,” he said. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species they’re the males.”

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is our Fox News moment. We’ve gone from “we found 11 guys who are good at games” to the tired old saw of “men destroy everything” in one quote. No, I don’t have a long list of female torturers and tin pot dictators to rebut with. But I do think that one-liners like this coming from the supposed cognoscenti do nothing to help the world understand the subtlety of human history, to say nothing of the world of videogames.