Where, oh where has my little 'lock gone?

Or…

Men are from Azeroth, Women are from Outland.

Edit: Apologies for repeated posting...attempting to defeat the evil format-monster of doom.

"We're not in Kansas any more"

I used to love Quest Helper, back when it was still being updated. Its genius I think lay in essentially removing the need for players to worry about the potentially tedious business of finding their way around. Epic migrations across the vast continents of Azeroth became a simple matter of following the twinkling yellow line towards your quest's end. Just like in that other adventure where they follow the yellow line, you could skip merrily along with your companions: shiny tin men, furry lions or leathery scarecrows desperately lacking for brains. From time to time you might have needed to dodge assaults from flying monkeys, but in terms of navigational complexity questing was about as challenging as taking candy from a gnome (and yet somehow just as fun).

That perhaps the most downloaded and depended-upon addon to emerge from the wow community was essentially an in-game GPS suggests just how important travel and navigation is in this game. I love speeding across the ever (and often abruptly) changing landscape on Charles the dragon, but I have found that for some of my friends travel can become an awkward and disrupting nuisance. It's an old (by which I mean borderline sexist) cliche that women can't read maps, but it has become something of a running joke in our guild that two of our female members spend most dungeons at the back of the group, missing exits, taking wrong turnings and in extreme cases, entering instances from the wrong end. Prejudiced comments aside I think the question of whether men and women do genuinely differ in the way they 'think' is of interest to a great many people. Since Wow has such an uncommonly large female player base, it must have something that other games lack to attract not just women, but all people who are not usually big gamers. I've decided to do a bit of research to find out what Science (with a capital 'S') has to say about this, using my 2/3 of a psychology degree as a point of reference. Read on...if you dare.


Human Mating; Electrodes; Imagination

In psychology persistent differences between groups of individuals are called 'Individual Differences' (we're an inventive bunch), and this term is applied not just to divisions of gender, but also race, age, or any other measurable factor one might care to investigate. This is an important point, since although many of the studies I have come across deal with differences between the sexes, in all cases the researchers (being good scientists) qualify their findings as trends rather than absolutes. It is entirely possible that some men might perform cognitive operations in a distinctly 'female' way, that is to say, with biases or tendencies more commonly found in women. And of course the reverse is true, all as a result of the random nature of human mating (have you seen human mating? It's a pretty random affair). Some women can read maps. Some women can read maps better than some men. Some men can talk maturely about their feelings, appreciate Sex in the City, and walk past a field of sheep without feeling the need to go 'baaah'. It's called the bell curve bitches, welcome to scienceville.

Amongst my psychologist buddies, we have a little test we like to administer when people ask about navigation and sex. First we attach a few electrodes to the scalp, and administer a small electric shock (this isn't in any way relevant to the test but it makes us feel better). We then ask the person to give us directions from say, their house to the local pub, and whilst doing so to think about how they visualise the route taken. Let's kick up the interaction a notch now (BAM!) and get you to try this. As you are probably a WoW player, I'd be interested to try this with some virtual landmarks. The kind of route to request is one that is not too complex, but equally one not so familiar as to be thoughtlessly accessible. I suspect most of you will be large and mighty level 80s by now, long since departed from old stomping grounds in Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor, so how about you describe the route between your main's racial starting area and his or her local capitol city. Directions need to be clear enough for someone who's never even heard of Azeroth, and while you give them pay attention to what your brain is doing.

The two most common responses are as follows: Some people see themselves moving through the landscape in smooth motion, possibly as a dot moving across a map. Others see a series of static 1st person pictures, akin to a slide show of key landmarks throughout the journey. I'll tell you later which is characteristically female and which is male. Of course, you might not see it like either of these. I have come across a few people with entirely different descriptions, and considering how complex and mutable an organ the brain is this is hardly surprising. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the 3rd person perspective used by 99% of WoW players might skew the results somewhat. Anyway, let me know your answers, especially if they fall outside the archetypes I described above. Ask your friends. Spread the good word of psychology to the masses.


Euclid played a Shaman?

Anyway, enough with the fascinating but irrelevant, now for some real science. In 2002 some researchers from the universities of York and Saskatchewan gave participants a real-world navigation task (also called 'wayfinding') in which they had to find an unfamiliar location on a university campus based upon one of two types of instructions. Half the participants were told key landmarks to aim for (Head for the physics department, take a right at the large hadron collider, don't stand in the void zones black hole) whilst the other half were given so-called 'Euclidean' instructions (100 meters north, 30 meters east etc). Overall they found that men made significantly fewer mistakes than women, and tended to reach their destination quicker. Further separation of the results showed that the differences were largely due to women having difficulty when given the Euclidean-type instructions (there was little difference between the groups guided by landmarks). Further testing with a pen-and-paper task involving plotting a route on a map grid found similar results. The patterns of results suggested that men could use both strategies well in either situation, whereas women tended to only be comfortable when using the landmarks. Now right away this starts to seem a little bit like what I got you to do earlier with the directions, and indeed the common finding from self-report questionnaires (and highly unscientific blog articles) is that women tend to use the landmark strategy in imagined and real life situations, whilst men concentrated on the Euclidian aspects of a route.


On the Inversion of Penguins

Obviously in most real-life situations we have the option of using whatever strategy we like, and so such clear differences don't emerge. But psychologists like to try and isolate them becuase that way they get to play with the shiny machines (we do so love our shiny machines). In the wayfinding study they managed to find a correlation between participants' performance and the well-studied process of 'mental-rotation', which is basically what you do when you try and imagine an upside-down penguin. Unfortunately they couldn't persuade the university of Saskatchewan to let them carry a very expensive shiny machine around the campus suspended a few inches over the participants' heads, luckily some more psychologists who really loved shiny machines (and probably computer games too) went on to give participants wayfinding tasks in a computer-simulated 3D environment, which was itself inside a large and extremely shiny functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). In doing so they produced some quite extraordinarily shiny pictures scans which basically showed that participants who were better at mental rotation were not only better at map-like, Euclidian learning, but importantly showed less brain activity (at least in certain areas) when doing it. This would indicate that men tend to be better at navigation because they don't have to use their brains as much when interpreting the geometric and spatial aspects of a route. Extrapolating slightly this might mean that in real life they are better able to use both this information and useful landmarks. Women by contrast are perhaps inclined to rely more exclusively on landmarks, because it requires less cognitive effort for them than processing Euclidian information.

At this point once again I should like to point out how none of what I'm talking about is meant as an absolute. One of the most convincing explanations for men's greater spatial ability is based on the fact that during early infancy, female brains develope faster in the left hemisphere than male brains. The left hemisphere is fairly well established as the 'language half', which is why girls tend to learn to read and write faster than boys. However, this early advantage tends to slow progression in the right hemisphere somewhat, at least when compared to boys. The slight advantage persists into adulthood, and so we at least partially explain, in a roundabout sort of way, that girls get lost more because their brains aren't as good as boys'. I guess is turns out Mother Nature actually possesses the egalitarian sensibilities of a bigoted Victorian male.


Dénouement (Horses)

Anyway, to drag the article kicking and screaming back to WoW, what implications might this have for the game? Well, probably none to be honest. Though one of the most consistent ways of finding sex differences in navigational ability is when testing with 3D interactive simulations, a great deal of this can likely be put down to the natural law that girls don't play computer games, so aren't as used to them. It's easy to forget this as a WoW-gamer, especially if you're one of the ones who is a girl and/or has a girlfriend. I suspect that women who play WoW might be a lot better at navigation than their non-gamer sisters thanks to all the practice they get in a pretty challenging environment. Coming back to the female guildies I mentioned at the start, though they do still provide the occasional amusing anecdote (half and hour to find the exit from Halls of Stone anyone?), they have got so much better in the year or so that I've been playing with them. Of course to be sure I'd have to test this theory...any volunteers out there?

So congratulations Blizzard, your game helps women overcome a centuries-old prejudice caused by an intractable biological disadvantage. If Nature is a sexist Victorian, Blizzard are chaining themselves to railings and being run over by horses (You go Ghostcrawler!). Crass generalisations aside though, it is still the case that men will have a natural advantage in an integral aspect of Warcraft, which makes me wonder if there might be something Blizz could do about it.

One study I found showed that sex differences are exaggerated in environments that are spatially ambiguous. To cite a WoW example, ever tried to talk your girlfriend out of Sunken Temple? As far as I know mine's still down there. Symmetrical dungeon design or particularly featureless game zones are, I think you'll agree, often the most irritating or boring areas to play in, and I suspect this may stem from having to spend ages working out where the hell you are. Blizzard's dungeon maps are a fantastic addition to the game, but I know that many of my guild mates, particularly the female ones, find them next to useless. Maybe they could be improved, particularly for girl gamers by adding some landmarks like the ones you see on those beautiful northrend zone maps. What the hell let's go crazy with the recommendations, cover the whole map in landmarks. Add tooltip images with screenshots or artwork views of important features. Give those Blizzard artists something to doodle in their lunch-breaks, "500 thumbnail sketches of castles, mountains and exciting trees from a player's-eye-view please. Yes Gary I know they all use the same models...we think that may be part of the problem". Make all this an optional overlay so that the boys can turn them off if they want to flex their Euclidian man-brains, and you've got yourself a big fat feature for the next patch. Thank me later Blizz, I accept Emblems of Conquest and cookies. Mainly cookies.


Orange.



References

Saucier, D. M., and Green, S. M. (2002). Are sex differences in navigation caused by sexually dimorphic strategies or by differences in the ability to use the strategies? Behavioural Neuroscience, 116(3), p403-410.

Shelton, A. L., and Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2004). Neural correlates of individual differences in spatial learning strategies. Neuropsychology, 18(3), p442-449.

Coluccia, E., and Louse, G. (2004). Gender differences in spatial orientation: A review. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(3), p329-340.

Coluccia, E., and Martello, A. (2004). The role of visuo-spatial working memory in geographical orientation: A correlational study. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 3, p523-552.