{"id":102340,"date":"2026-08-08T01:00:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102340"},"modified":"2026-08-07T11:37:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T15:37:14","slug":"qotd-why-more-men-than-women-love-videogames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/08\/08\/qotd-why-more-men-than-women-love-videogames\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Why more men than women love videogames"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><strong>Autumn Christian<\/strong> @teachrobotslove<\/p>\n<p><em>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 <strong>State of Decay 2<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>And I still have never loved games like I&#8217;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&#8217;d go home from making games to play more games. <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Honestly, it&#8217;s a big reason I quit game design. I didn&#8217;t have that obsessive, compulsive desire to play games in a way that superseded everything else in my life.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&#8217;ve never seen one consumed by them as their life falls apart around them.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Men. Want. Power.<\/p>\n<p>Men want to be able to <strong>do<\/strong> things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>If you doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It&#8217;s very telling that this is even <strong>possible<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Women don&#8217;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&#8217;t think I need to. If it&#8217;s not obvious, ask an LLM &#8220;why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation&#8221;. You&#8217;ll get an earful. <\/p>\n<p>Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this &mdash; instincts are what instincts are and I don&#8217;t waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.<\/p>\n<p>But understanding what&#8217;s going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren&#8217;t doomed to fail.<\/p>\n<p>ESR, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/esrtweet\/status\/2052299172041130007\" target=\"_blank\">The social media site formerly known as <em>Twitter<\/em><\/a>, 2026-05-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;ve seen the way men love [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14,28,41,15],"tags":[59,1235,139,43],"class_list":["post-102340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-media","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-addiction","tag-esr","tag-psychology","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qCE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102340"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104132,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102340\/revisions\/104132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}