The play boy wins it all...in a game

London, Feb 8 (UNI) Irritated with your boyfriend's never ending fantasy with Max Payne, Cossacks, Race and other such video games.

Don't sulk as rewarding feelings generated in the brain are more activated in those coming from Mars-- male of the species, experts have revealed.

The first of its kind study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research showed that young males were two to three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games.

Despite the popularity of video and computer games, little is known about the neural processes that occur as people play these games.

During the study, 22 young adults (11 men and 11 women) played numerous 24-second intervals of the game while being hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which produced a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain were working during a given activity.

After analyzing the imaging data for the entire group, the researchers found that male brains showed a much greater activation in the brain's region associated with reward and addiction.

The findings indicated that winning a computer game was more rewarding for men than for women. ''It doesn't take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species-they're the males,'' author Reiss said.

''Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory- and aggression-type games,'' he said.

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