There's an interesting study of gender differences in computer game play that is about to hit print and has already been summarized in the press. The study, by a group of researchers at Stanford led by Allan Reiss, shows differences in behaviour between men and women on a game in which the objective was to capture territory by pointing and clicking on balls on a computer screen. The more balls were clicked, and the closer the clicked balls were to a wall, the harder the player could push back the wall to capture more space. Both men and women learned how to play the game, but men outperformed women on the task. Not only this, but the pattern of brain activation was different in men and women, with some of the same areas that are involved in other kinds of reward (such as drug reward) lighting up more strongly in men than in women.
The authors speculate about a link with the known male territorial imperative. In many (but far from all) animals, males explore, occupy, and defend larger amounts of space than females do. The main reason for this has to do with patterns of mating. For lots of animals, control of territory converts to control of resources needed to attract mates. It's interesting to speculate about a mechanism that drives men to command space that is so deeply rooted that it can turn on the same ancient brain circuits that drive us to seek out crack cocaine, but it's too soon to know how critical the territorial component of the video game was to the outcome. One would need to test people using other kinds of games--experiments that it sounds as though this group intends to pursue.
Nevertheless, the study sent my mind to some interesting places. Modern warfare, as perhaps most clearly laid out by the French philosopher Paul Virilio, is as much about occupying by looking as it is about occupying by being on the ground. If I have a satellite that can look down on a piece of the ground from a position high above the planet and trigger a cruise missile attack when it sees something it doesn't like, then the surveillance itself, the potential for action, works just as well as columns of soldiers marching on the ground. It's more than interesting -- damned scary in fact -- to imagine men sitting at screens, watching displays of coloured pixels that represent buildings, villages, and lives, limbic systems pumping away as surely as if they were doing lines of coke on their dashboards filled with shiny buttons. These are video games at the highest and most deadly level.
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