Most of my stress relief lately has consisted of playing the famously masochistic game Bloodborne on my PS4 (using masochism to relieve stress sounds a little odd, I know). As I played, one question kept nagging at me: why are men, rather than women, more easily drawn to big-budget games?
Although the categories we use for games are actually pretty fuzzy, you probably know what I mean by big-budget games: games with relatively complex systems, elaborate plots and levels, long playthroughs, and a certain barrier to entry both for getting started and for playing well—in other words, what we might call “hardcore games.” You mostly find this kind of game on consoles like PlayStation and Xbox, as well as on PC.
Opposite big-budget games are “casual games,” with relatively simple systems, an easy learning curve, and a low barrier to entry. These days, they mostly live on mobile platforms.
According to statistics from the Japanese consulting firm GameAge (see the references at the end), male and female players are roughly evenly split among mobile-game players in Japan. But on console platforms such as PS4 and Nintendo Switch, and on PC, male players make up an overwhelming majority.
This data more or less confirms my subjective impression: players of big-budget games are mostly men—and their numerical advantage is remarkably obvious.
Clearly, big-budget games must have certain features that particularly appeal to men, while women just happen not to care much for them.
What are those features?
Unfortunately, my research skills are limited. Within the range of what I searched, I couldn’t find any study that directly answers this question. But I thought back to relevant material I’d come across, and it seems there may be two possible answers.
1. Expanding Territory
The first answer comes from The Pleasure Circuit. Its author, neuroscience heavyweight David Linden, lists a number of experimental findings: when men play certain games, the brain’s pleasure circuits really do become more strongly activated than those of female players. He speculates that this may be because many games contain an element of territory expansion.
This is actually pretty easy to understand. Although the mechanics of victory in many games look wildly different on the surface, at bottom they all involve players expanding into and conquering new territory. And men are more likely to derive pleasure from expanding territory. David Linden doesn’t explain why any further, but my guess is that this is an inherited trait developed by our male ancestors during their long lives in hunter-gatherer tribes. In those tribes, men were mainly responsible for grabbing territory.
To put it in a nutshell: under this hypothesis, men are drawn to big-budget games because they like to—grab territory.
I reflected on my own experience playing Bloodborne, and there really is something to this pleasure: every time I beat a boss and unlocked and explored a new area, the thrill was sometimes even greater than the sense of accomplishment that came from defeating the boss itself.
2. System Loving
The second answer comes from research on autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. There is abundant evidence that the psychological mechanism behind autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome may involve a tendency toward system loving.
One research group once surveyed 100 families with at least one autistic child to learn about the children’s interests. The responses were all over the place. Some children loved memorizing train timetables; some liked remembering the names of every member of a particular category of things, such as every species of mushroom; and some liked pouring water into a sink, then running outside to watch it flow out through the drainpipe. Scientists found that although these interests seemed to have nothing in common, they actually all reflected an impulse among autistic children to understand or construct a system. A “system” might be mechanical, such as the way a computer is put together, or abstract, such as discovering the patterns governing a category of things.
In other words, people with autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome have a powerful desire—and a powerful ability—to discover the patterns behind systems. In the right environment, this ability can actually give them a major advantage. Silicon Valley, for instance, is a region with a high prevalence of autism. This may well be because the software engineers who have gathered there carry genes associated with autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. Those genes help them move with ease within the “system of code.”
Autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome are far more prevalent in men than in women. Whatever evolutionary pressure gave rise to this tendency in the first place, evolution seems to have favored shaping men into “system lovers.”
And my guess is that big-budget games attract more male players precisely because of this tendency toward system loving.
Because almost every big-budget game is, without exception, a complex system. I thought about Bloodborne again. In any half-hour of playing, the elements I encounter include combinations of buttons for dozens of moves, outfits with more than a dozen different attributes, a weapon system, a rune system, an extremely complicated map, and a dozen or twenty different kinds of monsters. These hundreds, even thousands, of elements make up dozens of small systems, large and small, each of which takes a considerable amount of time to understand, test, and get familiar with before you can truly master it.
For people who don’t like puzzling over systems, a complex system like this is an outright nightmare. But in front of a “system lover,” it’s practically heroin.
To put it in a nutshell: under this second hypothesis, big-budget games attract more male players because they are “complex systems,” and men naturally contain more “system lovers.”
Personally, I find this second hypothesis more convincing. What do you think?
References:
1. Statistics on Japanese players: 34.23 million players, with console-game players making up nearly half. https://www.vgtime.com/topic/951902.jhtml?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0
2. Simon Baron-Cohen. (2013). Autism’s Love Affair with Silicon Valley. Global Science, 2013, (1): 46-49.
Note
- This article in the “New Findings in Psychology” series was a short piece of popular psychology and personal commentary written at the time to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: New Findings in Psychology. It was published on the now-shuttered platform FANTUAN, and the original link no longer exists.
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