Ever wonder why it sucks to play Scrabble with your girlfriend, who can't seem to grasp the concept that you have to jealously guard the Triple Word Score squares from enemy Js and Xs, and especially Qs and Zs? Some folks at Stanford took a stab at explaining it.

The Stanford University School of Medicine published a study last February suggesting that men are neurologically wired to be more competitive in videogames than women.

They set an equal number of men and women in front of screens and told them to click on moving balls. But what they didn't tell them is that there was a territorial conquest subgame. If the balls weren't clicked fast enough, they would hit and push back an advancing wall. But if they clicked away all the balls, the wall eventually claimed the entire screen. (Based on the description, the closest videogame analog I can think of is Missile Command: intercept incoming attacks, which get faster/closer. If they had given me a track ball, I would have destroyed their experiment!)

Both men and women caught on, and they were equally adept at clicking the balls. But it seemed that women weren't too concerned with conquering territory and their walls didn't advance as much. Furthermore, the participants were hooked up to MRI machines that mapped neurological activity in the region of the brain associated with rewards and addiction (otherwise known as the raiding guild region of the brain). Sure enough, men showed more activity, especially the ones who best guarded their walls.

Here's the money quote:

[Study author Allan] Reiss said this research also suggests that males have neural circuitry that makes them more liable than women to feel rewarded by a computer game with a territorial component and then more motivated to continue game-playing behavior. Based on this, he said, it makes sense that males are more prone to getting hooked on video games than females.

Which is just further evidence that it's a pretty safe bet the sexy elf chick on your PvP server is a dude.

By the way, I found this through a link at Videogamer.com. I was going to credit them until I noticed they're just posting press releases with their own names as bylines. I wouldn't have caught on except that I couldn't believe the dude reporting on the study actually used the word "mesocortocolimbic". Sure enough, he didn't, since the entirety of his text was copied and pasted from the Stanford press release. Classy.