this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Counter point.... maybe men are better at gaming because we normalize that gaming is a men's space. And we allow them to explore the hobby and practice it from a much younger age.
Like, women are pushed out of the space, whereas boys playing and becoming familiar with gaming, its controls, 3D environments, mechanics, spacial reasoning, puzzle tropes, menus systems.... are all very normative experiences. Women not so much. Much like how women tend to be better communicators and empathetic. Because that's the gender norms we push as a culture.
Saying men are better at gaming while ignoring the fact that we make it extremely uncomfortable for women to develop those same gaming skills is a huge bias.
Suffice to say, if your argument doesn't address that, then its a bullshit argument. I'm not gonna hear "maybe it's wOmEn hOrMoNeS" as anything other than casual misogyny.
It's like saying "hmmm maybe men are bad at showing their feelings because their brain is dumb" while ignoring the fact that society routinely ridicules and mocks men who are emotional.
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.