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While girls average a healthy five hours a week on video games, boys average 13. The problem? The brain chemistry of video games stimulates feel-good dopamine that builds motivation to win in a fantasy while starving the parts of the brain focused on real-world motivation.

Some people say video games rot your brain, but I think they work different muscles that maybe you don't normally use.

I find it a turnoff whenever men aren't into some kind of sport. And, no, video games don't count. I dated a guy who was into video games, and I wanted to shoot myself.

As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively - especially when they are well-designed.

Video games seem to be mostly a boy thing - viewed by young boys and created by big boys. I believe that if more videos games were created by women, the violence in these games - especially against women - would be rapidly toned down.

Games are the way we keep romance alive. They're based in human hardwiring. Playing hard-to-get or leaving a little to the imagination allows the woman to be wooed and appreciated and the man to be challenged and intrigued.

We are witnessing a very slow and painful cultural shift. Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change. They believe games should continue to cater exclusively to young heterosexual men with ever more extreme virtual power fantasies.

There are big lines between those who play video games and those who do not. For those who don't, video games are irrelevant. They think all video games must be too difficult.

I spoke at TED Global 2010 about the ways that video games engage the brain, and in particular, the idea of reward structures: how a challenge or task can be broken down and presented to make it as engaging as possible.