Sorry Guys, You’re Not Better Than Women at Gaming

My inner 16-year-old self wants to call my brothers, stick out my tongue and say "na-na na-na boo boo." It was the summer of 1996 and someone, I think maybe my aunt and uncle, bought my family a Nintendo 64. For a family who didn't even watch television, this was a massively huge deal.

I'll never forget fighting my brothers, Jeff and Brian, for a chance to play Super Mario. They're younger than me, but definitely fiercer when it comes to possessiveness. No matter how much I whined for them to just let me have a turn playing, they'd tell me I couldn't because I was a girl and definitely not nearly as skilled as they in the art of video game playing. Although my mom would yell for the boys to let me have a turn, they never did. They never let my sister, Beth either.

Well guess what? My brothers were wrong. And it feels amazing to say that.

Since video games first came out, there's been a stereotype about guys being better at them than women. Except that way of thinking is not true at all. Scientist actually learned that although men and women have differences, those differences don't cause them to perform better or worse than each other when gaming.

That’s right, you heard it here (so free to "na-na na-na boo boo" your brothers)- men are not better at video games than women.

But....(there's always a but) researchers say there are a lot of guys better at playing video games than women but it's not because they're men. It's because they spend a boatload of time playing, but this doesn't affect their gaming performance.

[via Daily Mail]