Brand New Sentence

I mean, I don't disagree that that's possible as well.

I'm just summarizing the literature on this, there are many more studies that indicate the effect difference exists, and as I said... nobody that I am aware of has sort of cleared the field with a broadly accepted explanation for why the observable effect does actually exist.

It's an open question in the published papers on this, afaik.

But yeah!

I agree with you, it would interesting to see a paper that actually takes into account essentially experience with different kinds of games with different kinds of practiced skillsets...

...and yeah definitely for quite a long time, video gaming was marketed as primarily 'male'... you'd get 'girl' games like Barbie's Horse Adventure, things that were some 90s marketing exec's idea of what a girl would want in a video game, and then the rest was John Romero's about to make you his BITCH, SUCK IT DOWN... etc.

Yeah, I remember 'GIRL = Guy In Real Life', I was in Ventrilo servers where a girl would join, and half the boys there would just immediately assume they're not actually a girl. There was a great deal of misogyny in video gaming, that has only somewhat lessened fairly recently.

It is indeed highly plausible to me that none of the eggheads who have studied this so far have gotten far into the science of how... yeah, video gaming? Being able to play video games?

Yeah thats actually a complex suite or combo if different mental and physical skills, like how a martial artist will tell you there's a lot more to unarmed combat than 'be fast and strong'.

Mind you, sp3ctr4l pointed out that an observed lower compatibility with VR games is the only relevant difference (with scientific backing) they're aware of. The hormone stuff is a proposed explanation that might be from one of the papers they cited, which I'm too tired to look into right now.

"The only difference I am aware of is more frequent motion sickness in VR games and here's three possible explanations, one of which involves hormones" is a much different statement than "women are worse at video games because of hormones". Almost diametrically so.

Sure, they could've spelled out the implication that there is no relevant difference in skill between sexes. But they definitely didn't make the statement you responded to.

Just summarizing the literature.

Here's the full section:

The vestibular system doesn't operate in a hormonal vacuum. Estrogen receptors are present in the inner ear, and estrogen plays a role in regulating the fluid dynamics and blood flow in the vestibular apparatus. When estrogen is low — as it is in the days before menstruation, during pregnancy and lactation, and throughout perimenopause — vestibular function can become destabilized.

Research on motion sickness susceptibility across the menstrual cycle has found that susceptibility fluctuates with hormonal state, with this fluctuation accounting for roughly one-third of the overall difference between men and women in motion sickness rates. This isn't a trivial contributor.

Progesterone, which has a broadly calming effect on the nervous system, also drops during the luteal phase and perimenopause. Its reduction increases sensory reactivity and reduces resilience to stimuli that challenge the vestibular system — which is precisely what VR does.

This creates meaningful variability: the same woman using the same headset playing the same game may have very different responses depending on where she is in her cycle. It's one layer of the broader pattern that makes VR motion sickness worse on some days without any change in the VR experience itself.