But the study's findings that men are more likely to "get hooked" on video games fly in the face of both retail figures and the marketing strategies of leading video game companies.
According to NPD Group, American men and women split nearly evenly when buying video game software and hardware in 2007. Fifty-six percent of the $18 billion market in the U.S. was male, while 42 percent was female.
Similarly, Nintendo has increasingly tried to cater to women, specifically soccer moms, with the widely popular Wii and its portable gaming system, the Nintendo DS.
While Entertainment Consumers' Association president Hal Halpin welcomes any research on video games, he is wary of this particular study.
"We welcome any and all research about video game consumers and this one certainly seems to have a lot of merit. A concerning aspect of the research for me is that it might lead one to draw the hypothesis that game addiction is a mental, rather than behavioral, process," Halpin said. "That men are more drawn to violence than women has generally been stipulated for some time, and that male gamers prefer fighting and shooting games follows suit. I suppose that it would be more interesting to see how far the correlation could be drawn into other types of media and in other mediums. ... To do otherwise and focus solely on aggressive or violent games, to my mind, seems a play at the sensationalistic and not as helpful as could be otherwise."
Reiss admits, however, that, at least when it comes to playing video games, biology isn't destiny.
"Just like all behaviors, this is genetic as well as environmental," he said. "All behaviors have both nature and nurture components to them."
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