I admit it – I enjoy video games. Since I played pong as a teenager I have always had access to some gaming platform and have played semi-regularly. Right now I am playing a weekly game with some friends (Lord of the Rings Online – a massive multi-player online game). The game is our generation’s version of the weekly poker night (or bridge or whatever) that our parent’s generation had. It is mostly about the social get-together, although now it is a virtual one.

Like many things, most people enjoy video games without it getting out of control. However, I know personally of more than one person whose gaming took over their life. At least for a time, they spent more time gaming that doing anthing else – more than work, more than school. When not playing they thought about the game and even had cravings for it. By all accounts it was an addiction.

The notion that video games can be addictive is nothing new. However there is a new study looking at this phenomenon with functional MRI scanning. What they found was not surprising, and confirms the addictive potential of video games.

They looked at 22 subjects, 11 women and 11 men, and had them play a video game while being imaged by fMRI. The game was simple, the computer screen had a vertical line down the middle, the “wall”, and then balls moved toward the wall from the left or right. The object is to click the balls on one side to move the wall toward that side. The press release describes the findings:

After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that the participants showed activation in the brain’s mesocorticolimbic center, the region typically associated with reward and addiction. Male brains, however, showed much greater activation, and the amount of activation was correlated with how much territory they gained. (This wasn’t the case with women.) Three structures within the reward circuit – the nucleus accumbens, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex – were also shown to influence each other much more in men than in women. And the better connected this circuit was, the better males performed in the game.

These are the same structures that are involved with other forms of addiction, including heroine and cocaine. This is not surprising – people play video games because they are fun, they make them feel good, and this generally equates to activation of the reward centers of the brain.

I also was not surprised that the study showed that men had more of a reward reaction than women. At least this correlates with the observation that men, on average, enjoy and play video games more than women. Now we have a neurological explanation for this difference.

The study authors also speculated that perhaps the men were more drawn to the territorial nature of the game – moving the wall could be seen as gaining territory. So perhaps the men were responding to a territorial instinct that did not hold as much of an appeal to the women.

More research will have to be done to replicate these results and also to see which variables correlate with the greater male reward response. I wonder if first person shooters are more addictive than simulation games? Perhaps games that involve shopping will be more addictive to women. That is the key remaining question – is it something about the video game medium that had more of an appeal for men, or was it the particular goal and nature of this video game?

We will have to await further studies to find the answers to these critical questions. Meanwhile I will continue to engage in my weekly orgy of slaughtering orcs and solving ancient riddles with my male buddies, at least until the Age of Conan is finally released.