What is the role
of testosterone in videogame play? And how has it affected the way
videogames are made?
The chemical
testosterone is often considered a “sex hormone”, because of its
role in sexual development in men, but in fact this steroid has
behavioural effects on men and women that are substantially the same.
Although men secrete about fifty times as much testosterone as women,
women are substantially more sensitive to the hormone with the net
result that similar behavioural effects can be detected among people
of either gender. What's more, these effects can be found in
essentially all the vertebrate species – fish, amphibians, lizards,
mammals and birds.
Testosterone is an
“action hormone”, that prompts quick responses and resolute
persistence, not to mention stubbornness. Studies by various
researchers, including John Archer, Andrew and Rogers, and James
McBride Dabbs, have shown that animals and people who are high in
testosterone can sustain a narrow focus for longer, and are thus
persistent at the tasks they pursue. Conversely, low-testosterone
people have been shown to be generally more friendly, more
intellectual and more compassionate than their high-testosterone
counterparts. As a result, low-testosterone people tend to do better
in school, have higher paid (and higher status) jobs, have closer
relationships with their families, and sustain happier marriages.
Another
significant effect of testosterone is developmental: the higher
dosages of testosterone result in greater brain volume in men but at
the cost of a smaller corpus callosum, an area of the brain which
co-ordinates information between the two hemispheres. (Note, however,
that a larger brain does not make one smarter – despite what the
Saturday morning cartoons might suggest). Researchers have observed
that, typically, the female brain is far better at thinking in terms
of networks (social or otherwise), although it should be noted that
there is a great deal of variation among individuals. This change in
brain development is a genuine gender distinction, and results from
the effects of the higher levels of testosterone on developing boys.
A convenient way
of summarising the effects of testosterone on behaviour is to suggest
that high testosterone is correlated with dominance behaviours. This
can mean many different things, including assertion, vanity,
aggression, charisma, and high sex drive, but note that these
behaviours can happen in people irrespective of their testosterone
levels. It is not that testosterone causes
dominance behaviour, just that it encourages
it. High levels of testosterone are correlated with both roguish
behaviour and heroism – Dabbs describes many examples of heroic
behaviour among people with above-average testosterone, including
fire-fighters and soldiers who acted to save the lives of others
without any thought for their own safety.
In the context of play, testosterone has an effect in any competitive
situation. Just before a tennis match, a professional player's
testosterone will increase – and it will surge if they win a
tournament. If they lose, their testosterone will fall. These changes
in testosterone level are not restricted to physical sports, either –
the testosterone levels of chess players also fall when they lose a
game. Whenever an individual is emotionally invested in an outcome –
when their pride is at stake, if you will, a drop in testosterone is
likely in defeat or failure, and a spike in victory.
A
recent study lead by David Geary at the University of Missouri in
Columbia explored testosterone in the context of videogame play,
specifically multiplayer Unreal Tournament 2004.
Fourteen groups of three male players (who had not met each other
before) were matched against each other after having practices
together for about six hours. To add an incentive to win, the teams
that were victorious earned a reward of $45, three times what the
losers were paid for their participation.
The study found an unexpected effect: while winning players did
experience a testosterone spike when they were victorious (and
especially among players who had most contributed to the win), when
the teams played against each other the highest scoring player tended
to produce less testosterone than their defeated team mates. Similar
results were found in a study by John Wagner of competitive domino
players on the island of Dominica. When playing with people in their
own village, winners testosterone levels fell and stayed low, whereas
loser's testosterone fell then rebounded. Only when playing against
people from other villages did testosterone reliable rise.
Testosterone can thus be seen as a
driving force towards winning – rising in preparation for a
challenge, and falling in defeat. But in a friendly contest between
colleagues, the stakes are lower and testosterone has a significantly
reduced role. One can assume that all forms of non-competitive play
are less affected by testosterone, and indeed studies of pathological
gamblers did not find a correlation with testosterone levels.
The results of the BrainHex
survey, which is currently going on at BrainHex.com, reveals an
interesting split in the play patterns of male and female players
that may also relate to testosterone. Six of the seven play styles in
this model have roughly the same distribution among men and women,
and appear in the same order. Only one play style is significantly
different by gender: Conqueror. This adversarial, victory-focussed style of play is the most popular among male players
surveyed so far, being the highest rated in over a quarter of male
respondents. But among female players in the survey, it ranks fourth
(after Mastermind, Seeker and Achiever) with just one in eight female
players preferring this play style above all others. (See the full numbers in the piece on BrainHex Class and Gender).
There is a significant gender skew in
the respondents to the survey thus for, with just 11% female people
in the sample: if a projection is made of how the audience would be
comprised if it were made up of an equal number of male and female
players, Conqueror would be third in the list, corresponding to one
in five people. Seeker would be above it with just a few percent more
respondents, and Mastermind at the top, corresponding to about one in
four people. Exploration and problem-solving could well be more
popular than striving for victory, although regardless of this all
three play styles together still only represent two thirds of the
players in the audience as a whole.
There are at least two distinct ways of
looking at this data. Firstly, one could look at the industry's
predilection for first person shooters and other competitive action
games – all of which embody testosterone's focus on
acting-over-thinking, and a persistent drive towards eventual victory
– as more than adequately servicing the needs of testosterone in
the audience for games. This naturally involves more male than female
players (and it would be interesting to see if the female players who
test as Conqueror in BrainHex would have above-average
testosterone levels).
Alternatively, you could look at the
popularity of Mastermind and Seeker among both men and women and
accuse the industry of biasing its output heavily towards
testosterone-style play, irrespective of the commercial reality of
the marketplace. It is presumably no coincidence that the vast
majority of people who work in the videogames industry are male, and
thus far only Nintendo among the major platform holders has been able
to push beyond thinking primarily in terms of Conqueror as the
supreme element in videogame play.
There is a major unanswered question
here. Is the market inundated with action games because
testosterone-driven play is more addictive and satisfying than other
kinds of play (and thus this is the most reliable audience to court)
or is the prevalence of the 3D shooter merely the evidence that the
industry has allowed itself to be biased towards making the games it
wants to play, rather than exploring what the audience might want to
play, as I have frequently accused?
The phenomenal success of games such as
The Sims, Nintendogs, Brain Training and Wii
Fit (all of which have sold more than twice as many units as the
most successful first person shooter) suggests the latter, but it
must be noted that among male respondents in the BrainHex
survey 51% have Conqueror as either their first or their second
highest ranked class, and even among female respondents 32% have
Conqueror as the first or second highest. (Note that Mastermind
appears as one of the top two classes for 40% of male and 50% of
female, and Seeker appears as one of the top two classes for 34% of
male and 45% of female respondents in the current sample).
What is happening in the videogames
industry at the moment, principally via the work of Nintendo and
casual games developers such as PopCap and Big Fish, is the
realisation that there are other audiences out there just waiting to
be tapped. What's more, these wider audiences for games can be
reached via games that are a lot less expensive to develop than Halo
3 or Call of Duty 4, which cost around $30 million to
develop and courted an audience of around 10 million players. Animal
Crossing – which is proving to be a very popular franchise
among the Mastermind players in the survey – sold as many units on
less than a tenth of the development budget.
There will always be a thriving market
for violent action games that demand quick thinking, swift reflexes
and cut-throat tactics – undoubtedly teenage boys, adult men and
some small percentage of women will continue to play and enjoy these
kinds of games. But it's time for the industry to recognise that
these games are not the most successful genres in production, and in
fact that most of the games that go into the FPS marketplace fail
miserably. Halo and Call of Duty, the flagship
franchises for testosterone play, soak up the vast majority of the
audience for 3D shooters accounting for roughly 50% of the sales of
FPS games. In the last three years, the next highest selling FPS that
wasn't in either franchise sold less than a third as many copies,
while at least 2 in 3 first person shooters released over the same
period failed to make back their development costs.
Does it really make sense for most
developers to be making games to compete against vast numbers of
better funded, better marketed 3D shooters with vanishing hope of
commercial success? Or is this just testosterone dictating that the
fight against incredible odds is a challenge that must be accepted?
If games developers and publishers are wrapped up in some bizarre
dominance struggle centred around shooting games it would mean that
testosterone isn't just responsible for one of the more popular forms
of play, it's also partly responsible for blocking the creation of
videogames for a wider audience.