Video Games and Gender
Here is a link to an idiotic NY Observer [NO] article about video games, and here is a link to Mouse Musings' [MM] reactions. Below are a few excerpts:
NO: It’s not that all women reflexively hate video games, of course; many fondly remember Super Mario Brothers and Ms. Pac-Man, or the thrill of clobbering their brother at Tecmo Bowl. But it’s inescapable that men just like to play with gadgets more; it’s something about the thumbs.
MM: Since we know that men have thumbs and women don't, of course. Or is it that we can't manipulate a video game controller because we all have expensive manicures? I can't remember.
NO: Part of what keeps these guys playing the game to the point of nausea is simply that it’s hard; it actually requires skill, a weird kind of unlearnable skill. (Many a male noted sympathetically that girls simply don’t have the studied hand-eye coordination that they do.)
MM: When it comes to this alien concept "fun", suddenly women are all thumbs. But don't forget, when it comes to cooking dinner, women indeed have better hand-eye coordination, since it developed in the caveman days when men were out killing big animals and women were at home doing the cavewoman version of needlework.
And here are a couple of comments the MM post attracted:
43% of video game players are female...More demos here: http://www.games-advertising.com/demographics.html
By Roxanne, at 16.12.04
Roxanne, what you're forgetting is that female gamers tend to be more scary than sexy...and since they aren't sexy, they aren't actually women.
By james d, at 16.12.04
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