Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove
I love video games. I met my husband because he hired me to QA for a Sims game. I was a game designer for companies like Zynga and EA. I was a writer on State of Decay 2.
And I still have never loved games like I’ve seen the way men love games. I was surrounded by men who would eagerly work on min-max spreadsheets during their lunch break. One designer had a cabinet full of games that he would replay over and over again to study the levels. They’d go home from making games to play more games.
Honestly, it’s a big reason I quit game design. I didn’t have that obsessive, compulsive desire to play games in a way that superseded everything else in my life. Lots of women play videogames. I’ve never seen one consumed by them as their life falls apart around them.
Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don’t become obsessed with them the way men do. I know why, and I think it reveals a tremendously important difference between male-typical and female-typical psychology.
Men. Want. Power.
Men want to be able to do things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.
Video games are a fast, reliable superstimulus for that urge. With only a handful of exceptions, the good ones are designed to both excite the desire for agency and power, and to satisfy it.
If you doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It’s very telling that this is even possible.
Women don’t work that way. I could go off on a long tear about why, but the evolutionary-biology reasons are so obvious that I don’t think I need to. If it’s not obvious, ask an LLM “why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation”. You’ll get an earful.
Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.
It’s not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don’t really understand or identify with. To them, a game-obsessed man is dropping out of the real-world contest, wasting the traits and energy that would otherwise make him attractive on a pursuit that is both literally and figuratively sterile.
I don’t have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this — instincts are what instincts are and I don’t waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.
But understanding what’s going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren’t doomed to fail.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.
August 8, 2026
QotD: Why more men than women love videogames
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