Why do men like video games way more than women?
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anab0lic36
Member
Because men, by their very nature, are problem solvers and abstract thinkers, which is really what most games are asking of you as a player ... unless you are playing some kind of story based game, where gameplay is secondary, thats less challenging and more passive.
Also, most female streamers are doing it for the attention and money, more so than for the love of gaming and its extremely noticeable if you can read body-language as to whether someones being genuine or not.
I also don't ever believe you will have women being able to compete with the top players in Esports, as men just like they have potential for further development physically, also have potential to take their mental development further, as can be seen throughout all of history or in fields outside of gaming that require certain mental faculties in todays world where it is predominately men at the top.
Also, most female streamers are doing it for the attention and money, more so than for the love of gaming and its extremely noticeable if you can read body-language as to whether someones being genuine or not.
I also don't ever believe you will have women being able to compete with the top players in Esports, as men just like they have potential for further development physically, also have potential to take their mental development further, as can be seen throughout all of history or in fields outside of gaming that require certain mental faculties in todays world where it is predominately men at the top.
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anab0lic36
Member
They play the game called instagram/only fans and make more money for less 'work.' Taking a revealing selfie is much better profit to time investment than understanding wtf is going on in Dota and begging for subs.
anab0lic36
Member
I haven't played it, but isnt that game a lot about gathering,nurturing, socializing and home building.? Which plays to womens natural strengths and desires in the real world.
EliTheIceMan
Member
1) women plot when their in a relationship evil boss style
2)women in relationships count your money as theirs - hence why they hate you spending on video games
3) They tell you what to do and when you do listen it’s that time of the month for them -the monster comes out
4) they want attention *
5) because women always want to keep men down .
6)Games are straight forward and women are complicated
7)relationships ruin gaming lol
DeceptiveAlarm
Member
Divorced? Or virgin? Your anger at women says it has to be one.
LordKasual
Banned
You really overestimate the amount of problem solving in games.
The vast majority of it is developing patterns and adjusting for reactions. In competitive games, you can throw in reading your opponent, but this also is mostly just a matter of repetition. You could literally be clairvoyant and still lose to a veteran fighting game player due to lack of in-depth knowledge, that you only get from practice.
I can't recall the last game i've played with a puzzle i couldn't have solved in the 4th-5th grade.
Ironically, games that DO have more difficult puzzles are literally puzzle games.....which I tend to see women enjoying way more than men.
Reality check:
ALL streamers are doing it for attention and money. Women just have a niche that guys can't really exploit. They don't HAVE to be top 5% of players in the world to get a viewerbase. But saying female streamers are bad at games is to ignore the millions of male streamers who stream their gameplay but suck at whatever they're playing.
And there are some who leverage their looks but are still pretty good at games, like SSSniperwolf.
And in FFXIV my raid guides are now all from MTQ's videos because they're better put together than Mr.Happy's videos.
There are already women at the top of Esports. I used to go to local tournaments around where i live and there were 2 women there that consistently placed in Smash.
I wager the only reason there aren't more women at the top of Esports is because there are simply far less women playing fighting games than men.
It's a bit silly to talk about how women aren't at the top of Esports because they can't get there, when there are already well-known women who place high at tournaments and they are VASTLY outnumbered by men.
And by that metric, 99.9% of men don't get to the top level of Esports either. I feel like it's a misnomer.
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imsosleepy
Member
well over here.. Allmost all the female friends I have they think that its stupid.
They are the ones that say ''why do you game all evening? Thats dumb.'' while they are watching netflix all day and night when they are free.
I did get my gf into gaming. She played diablo 3 with me, halo. She loved overwatch and finished Zelda completely. But games like witcher, she just sucks at it really badly lol
They are the ones that say ''why do you game all evening? Thats dumb.'' while they are watching netflix all day and night when they are free.
I did get my gf into gaming. She played diablo 3 with me, halo. She loved overwatch and finished Zelda completely. But games like witcher, she just sucks at it really badly lol
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anab0lic36
Member
Then you and I play very different types of games, because the ones I'm most attracted to have problem solving in abundance. I like games that are heavy in strategy and tactics like Dota, RTS and Turn based games. Even platforming games, FPS and shoot em ups have an element of problem solving to them too though, its not just about reflexes and dexterity,. As how to most efficiently overcome the challenges they present is a big factor. In fact, the lack of problem solving, and how little is asked of you as a player, is why a lot modern AAA games do nothing for me, borderline put me to sleep, as my brain only has minimal involvement with a lot of these all flash little substance story 'immersion' games.
Absolutely not true that all streamers do it just for the money, what an absurd statement. Sure there are people like that, but a lot of people actually love devoting a lot of their time to playing games and interacting with the communities/fan base they build, especially the more extroverted personality types.
Show me a female player that can compete and beat the top Dota,League of legends, counterstrike, Starcraft, chess etc male players? The only ones you will find are are transgenders.... Its not just merely a matter of repetition when it comes to esports either, metas develop within these games and creative solutions often come out on top, because most people are putting in the same amount of hours daily to be the best.
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carlosrox
Banned
Can we? I don't think a feral boy/girl would have a predilection towards cars/dolls or blue/pink. I think that is mainly socialization and conditioning.
anab0lic36
Member
Big marketing efforts have been made to try to bring in more females and it hasnt worked nearly as well as companies would like. There is a good reason for that - men and women are wired differently and generally seek different things in life.
carlosrox
Banned
But that's probably mainly due to videogames already being perceived as a hobby for boys.
Girls love Animal Crossing for example. They also apparently dig Luigi.
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LordKasual
Banned
Majority of my gaming is Fighting Games and FPS. Used to play League. I find Legends of Runeterra fun too.
RTS games are similar to fighting games -- once you understand the game on a fundamental level, you reach a point where optimization is MOSTLY a matter of memorization, and you adjust your strategies in realtime based on guesses / reads from your opponent.
The amount of variables in any situation decreases as you develop strategies to mitigate them. "Strategy" in this sense is just a matter of which learned tactic is best in which situation. This is just as true for fighting games as for RTS.
My point is, there is decision making to be had, but the majority of the work is NOT done in real-time. It's done in practice, where you develop the skills and drill your tactics. The evolution of the Meta even reflects this, most of the time a game can be mostly static until a single person discovers something in practice mode that changes the entire landscape.
Women do this too, though, there's nothing exclusive about it to men. I think you're focusing alot on the thirst trap streamers, which ironically are only boosted to popular status BY male viewers anyway.
I don't know any female players at the top of those games....but again, I don't play them, and these are games that are majorly male dominated anyway. None of them even try to be marketed towards women.
An extremely low % of the male playerbase gets to the top anyway.......run that same dice roll on the female population and it's no wonder you don't see any.
Overwatch on the other hand has PLENTY of high-level female players.
Majority of the 2D fighting games seem to mostly have trans women in top spots, but 3D games are not like this. Tekken has a handful of high-placing women too.
It's too late. Gamers sometimes forget how "meta" gaming has become over the years.
For instance, most of us here could probably pick up an FPS game and, no matter how good or bad we are, generally understand the entire control scheme upon picking up the controller, with minor adjustments. Even simple gamer concepts like Melee attacks (for some reason) doing large amounts of damage compared to bullets at close range.
This is because we've grown up WITH the control schemes of these games. And these days, most games are just older games with variations on established concepts.
Newcomers, male or female, have to first learn how to play games before they even get to learning how to enjoy a specific one.
Have you ever watched a non-gamer try and use Dual Analog controls for the first time? It's painful.
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anab0lic36
Member
See my post above as to why girls like some types of games such as animal crossing.
It has nothing to do with a women perceiving it as not to her tastes based on what shes been told by others, nor is it her being scared of being perceived as less feminine by others for liking such things. They simply just are not as mentally aroused and stimulated by this hobby. Try self marketing your favourite games to females you know, it doesn't matter how well you sell it, most of them just wont get it. Most will go as far as to label it a waste of time or childish, as has been noted by many others in this thread already.
Silvawuff
Member
I'm a woman and I've been gaming all my life. I feel like girls game just as much as guys do, we're just more subtle about it and may prefer different genres over the more popular, big ones like FPS, sports, or MOBAs. Gaming media just suck at acknowledging this because it gets more attention to push some gender-divisive narrative when it comes to video games. Keep in mind the same people posting about this are also positing that video games cause violence.
laynelane
Member
My brother was recently telling me how my niece doesn't have any strong interest in anything. She's six years old. I suggested that she might enjoy video games - to which he sincerely replied, "but she's a girl". What's even more interesting is that he said this to me, his sister. So, those kinds of attitudes may have something to do with it.
junguler
Banned
how is that sexist? that's just stating facts, you don't have to like it for it to be true.
here is a clip if you are interested, if not i will just agree to disagree and move on
T-I-N-M-A-N dX
Member
Totally read that wrong and thought what kind of fuckery is this and who is turning down women for video games.
anab0lic36
Member
Its the product of millions of years of evolution and how the two sexes evolved differently assigned to different roles. Look at the roles and activities that a man played throughout much of our existence as a species - the hunter, the fighter, the builder the gender that worked a lot with tools. Now compare this to the role that the female played.... the nurturer ,the family/home maker the social glue holding societys together while the men were busy doing their thing.... It makes perfect sense as to why we differ in our interests when you look at modern humans through the lens of evolution.
If you think we have evolved past this genetically because our modern landscape is vastly different to our tribal more primitive times, (which is most of our existence) then you don't understand biology and how long it takes for significant change to occur within our genes. Much of what we had in us then is still very much present within each and every one of us today. In life we tend to gravitate towards the things we have the potential to be good at and men just have more potential to be good a what gaming demands of you..... women instead gravitate towards other things, that they are naturally more adept at and thus derive more meaning and purpose from.
yurinka
Member
Well, here seems to prove women have different preferences regarding gaming in terms of genres:
en.wikipedia.org
Women and video games - Wikipedia
Mister Wolf
Member
I agree with you. Us humans as a species haven't even got past tribalism.
Woopah
Member
Different games will have different gender splits but there's no reason gaming as a whole shouldn't have an even split between men and women. With gaming being less specifically targeted as men as they often were in the 80s and 90s I think we'll see more and more women play video games. Its a big market and companies like Nintendo are making the most of it.
Happosai
Hold onto your panties
Aside from my wife and sisters...I don't know. About that, though. My sisters played my consoles more than me as a kid. Then, I met my wife and her favourite franchises are Street Fighter, Mega Man, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Zelda, and the Smash Bros bit. She's shamed all of us...me, my cousins (who are men), and she used to kill people on the arcade machines prior. Most women are not like my wife. My wife also likes alpha male characters in film and anime and she introduced me to many action film classic I'd never seen. Granted, most women aren't like this. One of my cousins married about the same time I did (he's a gamer, too) and his wife despises anything that's not feminine and hates his games. I swear that psycho woman made him well his PS4 and Switch because she simply didn't like them (he bought them back in secret).
I agree with the OP. My wife is like the 3% of women gamers. The others just don't seem to care and it ends up being a mostly make market. Oh well
Lanrutcon
Member
You specifically mentioned "point and click adventure and puzzle games", which I am referring to. The golden age of adventure games, in both quality and quantity, was in the exact era you're talking about. And when win95 dropped, we were still using DOS to game. Win95 might have caught on as an OS pretty rapidly, but it took ages to catch on for gaming. Most PCs didn't have the memory to run games while Win95 was running, and had to boot in DOS to free up the required RAM.
My computer studies class had more chicks than dudes. You didn't have to "learn os and programming" to type "kingsquest2.exe". It's not more difficult for a girl to learn either of those things than a guy anyway.
Yeah , that's why mandatory tutorials are a thing. If you were right (and you're not), then AC 6 wouldn't need to tell me how to play the game and games wouldn't constantly be getting streamlined to expand their audience. We're literally in the middle of a major diversity push when it comes to gaming. You think they're doing this to target older players?
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Old Retro
Member
I "broke the mold" decades ago and have been gaming ever since. I've been to tournaments and cons and was amognst maybe 5-10% of the female occupants there, competitor or not. There's many aspects to gaming that are universal like the challenge, the music, and agree with me or not, the artform.
Plus based on the shithead comments in this thread, what lady in her right mind would want to be a part of the gamer culture?
Plus based on the shithead comments in this thread, what lady in her right mind would want to be a part of the gamer culture?
iorek21
Member
Probably because men are naturally more inclined to like technological/mechanical stuff whilst women are more into "human" stuff like literature, art, TV series, music etc.
It's the very same reason that makes men be more inclined to persue Exact Sciences careers whilst women are the majority in Humanities
Obviously, there are exceptions
It's the very same reason that makes men be more inclined to persue Exact Sciences careers whilst women are the majority in Humanities
Obviously, there are exceptions
Happosai
Hold onto your panties
My wife, no joke about what I wrote in my post. I'm not sure how/why she's so good -- here in Mexico she's a gamer to be reckoned with. The only titles I can beat her at are those which she's never played (which isn't much).I "broke the mold" decades ago and have been gaming ever since. I've been to tournaments and cons and was amognst maybe 5-10% of the female occupants there, competitor or not. There's many aspects to gaming that are universal like the challenge, the music, and agree with me or not, the artform.
Plus based on the shithead comments in this thread, what lady in her right mind would want to be a part of the gamer culture?
deriks
4-Time GIF/Meme God
Take 100 random men and woman in their 20~40s.
Ask them to put in a 1-5 order: watch Friends, read a book, go to the beach, play videogames, go to a live concert
I'm a believer that more than 50% of the girls will put videogames at 5, but not guys. And I'm sure that this is not a problem at all
Ask them to put in a 1-5 order: watch Friends, read a book, go to the beach, play videogames, go to a live concert
I'm a believer that more than 50% of the girls will put videogames at 5, but not guys. And I'm sure that this is not a problem at all
Mass Shift
Member
LOL! What kind of women are you dating?
Find women with similar interests. They're not as rare as you think.
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greenteaforme
Member
Saw a post about men liking things and women liking people, which makes me think it largely comes to introverts VS extroverts rather than men VS women. Men in my experience tend to be less social for the most part, there's exceptions but they can go for longer without seeing people. It makes sense that a hobby like gaming would appeal to men because men are less social.
This makes sense to me because I am an introvert and so are my female gamer friends. We can stay inside and away from others for a long period of time. My dad is an introvert and loves gaming. My mom is an extrovert and hasn't played a video game since the original Zelda came out.
This makes sense to me because I am an introvert and so are my female gamer friends. We can stay inside and away from others for a long period of time. My dad is an introvert and loves gaming. My mom is an extrovert and hasn't played a video game since the original Zelda came out.
MeatSafeMurderer
Member
Socialization and conditioning of infants no more than a few hours old and primates that aren't even remotely human? Sorry bud, the science does not agree with you. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species, both physically and psychologically.
Broseybrose
Member
Oh man, I read your post title as "Why do men PREFER games over women?" and I had a dozen jokes ready to fly...
A little disappointed when I realized what you were actually asking.
Id say most of my GFs were gamers. Its really common nowadays. From my experience its no longer the male hobby it once was. My last GF played Animal Crossing, Skyrim, Witcher 3, and all kinds of JRPGs too.
A little disappointed when I realized what you were actually asking.
Id say most of my GFs were gamers. Its really common nowadays. From my experience its no longer the male hobby it once was. My last GF played Animal Crossing, Skyrim, Witcher 3, and all kinds of JRPGs too.
Humdinger
Gold Member
The gender split is about 50/50 (well, 54/46), but women prefer different types of games and are less likely to identify themselves as a "gamer."
If the question is, "Why do men like shooters, hack-and-slash games, and AAA action-adventure titles more than women?" then I'd agree with several answers already put forward:
- Our biological heritage gives the sexes different interests. Men are, on average, more interested in competition, "achievement" or "success" (even in virtual terms), aggressive play, and things (computers and electronics, for instance), whereas women are, on average, more interested in relationships, people, and stories. Those are generalizations, and there is a huge range of individual variability (e.g., many men who are more interested in relationships than things, who aren't all that into competition, etc.), but they hold up as generalizations, and they influence what games the genders (on average) choose.
- Games originated from a nerdy computer culture that was male-dominated. In essence, men built the world of videogames. Men and boys were the first to really use it and love it. Most games were created by men, historically. So that history shaped it.
- Traditional stereotypes play a role as well. They make it harder for both men and women to open themselves up to different types of games.
I think those are the main factors.
If the question is, "Why do men like shooters, hack-and-slash games, and AAA action-adventure titles more than women?" then I'd agree with several answers already put forward:
- Our biological heritage gives the sexes different interests. Men are, on average, more interested in competition, "achievement" or "success" (even in virtual terms), aggressive play, and things (computers and electronics, for instance), whereas women are, on average, more interested in relationships, people, and stories. Those are generalizations, and there is a huge range of individual variability (e.g., many men who are more interested in relationships than things, who aren't all that into competition, etc.), but they hold up as generalizations, and they influence what games the genders (on average) choose.
- Games originated from a nerdy computer culture that was male-dominated. In essence, men built the world of videogames. Men and boys were the first to really use it and love it. Most games were created by men, historically. So that history shaped it.
- Traditional stereotypes play a role as well. They make it harder for both men and women to open themselves up to different types of games.
I think those are the main factors.
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Woopah
Member
I think its a result of the video game industry primarily being born out of the tech industry and so in many cases games were made by men for boys/men. This is now changing and most likely we now have a 50/50 gender split across all types of gaming (console, mobile, PC, browser etc.). I think in future we'll have a 50/50 gender spit for console gaming as well but it will take a few years to get there.
MeatSafeMurderer
Member
We need a lost GAFfers thread to link to in cases like this.
Imru’ al-Qays
Member
1. People vs thing orientation
2. Eye-hand coordination and spatial reasoning
3. Competitiveness, violence, dominance
2. Eye-hand coordination and spatial reasoning
3. Competitiveness, violence, dominance
Valt7786
Member
It always struck me as (at least in the past, much less so now with the under 25's, but ladies older than 30 definitely) see it as a waste of time, when you could be doing something productive around the house or with the kids or with them or something?
But then it's always ok for them to go melt their brains watching garbage like Love Island so...who knows.
But then it's always ok for them to go melt their brains watching garbage like Love Island so...who knows.
Yoboman
Member
Games in their infancy were marketed almost entirely to boys. That made it a boys hobby, like dolls were made a girls hobby. That preconception is very powerful to try and overcome now
Secondly they were also developed exclusively to make boys interested. So entire genres that make up most of gaming are built around that ideal. It’s why games with guns, swords fighting, sports, racing etc are so ingrained. Even where it’s not you are often saving the princess or something.
But women can absolutely like games. The unfortunate thing is they kind of hide it. Which must suck. Games like the Sims come to mind as having been hugely successful because of women and I’d argue even the combat stuff can be liked by women, they are just ingrained into the belief that it’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t interest them
Secondly they were also developed exclusively to make boys interested. So entire genres that make up most of gaming are built around that ideal. It’s why games with guns, swords fighting, sports, racing etc are so ingrained. Even where it’s not you are often saving the princess or something.
But women can absolutely like games. The unfortunate thing is they kind of hide it. Which must suck. Games like the Sims come to mind as having been hugely successful because of women and I’d argue even the combat stuff can be liked by women, they are just ingrained into the belief that it’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t interest them
Allnamestakenlol
Member
*shrug*
All I care is that my wife likes videogames just as much as I do.
All I care is that my wife likes videogames just as much as I do.
Hendrick's
If only my penis was as big as my GamerScore!
All I care about is that mine doesn't nag or bitch about me playing games.
