Have you ever been playing an online shooter when a girl pops into the match?  Most of the players immediately fall into one of two camps.  They either start harassing the girl with juvenile insults or they become creepily polite and offer to help her not get p0wned.  Both reactions are childish.  And both of them are signs that girls are a rare breed in gaming.  These boys are HUNGRY!

And a new Michigan State University study backs that up.  After interviewing 276 undergrads, researchers found that men on average have more free time during the week than women, and they tended to play games more often.  It seems ladies are just more focused on work and studying.  Who knew?

But while there is a statistical correlation between leisure time and gaming time, one co-author of the study suggests that the lack of female game designers might also contribute to a lack of female gamers.  If women aren't making games for women, why should women play games?

A couple of other interesting statistics also came out of the study.  People who played games early in life tended to keep up their gaming habits through college.  And the amount of time students spent playing games didn't seem to affect their GPAs.  Which makes a lot of sense to me.  In college, I played games mostly at night.  My class skipping time was mostly wasted napping, eating Ramen noodles, and trying to drown out the Sailor Moon soundtrack blaring from my smelly roommate's headphones.

Source: Physorg.com