Why video games are the new IQ tests

Gamers won’t be surprised. We and our colleagues have discovered a link between people’s ability to play video games and their general intelligence. Our research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, can’t establish whether playing video games makes people smarter or whether being smart makes you better at video games (or some other explanation). But it points to intriguing possibilities in using games more generally for behavioural science, in particular for measuring people’s intelligence.

To demonstrate this, our team (led by Professor Alex Wade) ran two studies. The first involved 56 experienced players of League of Legends, a "multiplayer online battle arena" (MOBA) game where two teams of five players compete in a fast-paced strategy game. League of Legends is highly popular – millions play it every day around the world. It has a thriving professional esports scene – a rapidly growing US$700m industry where millions of viewers watch matches between highly-skilled professional players.

For our study, the experienced players conducted standard paper-and-pencil intelligence tests. The results showed that those with higher IQ test scores tended to perform better at the game. Our measurements showed that highly ranked League of Legends players have an average IQ of around 115-120, putting them in the top 15% of the population.

In our second study, we analysed gameplay data for more than 20,000 participants playing two MOBAs (League of Legends and Dota 2) and two "first-person shooters" (Destiny and Battlefield 3). First-person shooters are fast-action games involving shooting enemies and other targets, in which players view the action as though through the eyes of the character they are controlling.

We used data for the players’ performance in the game and their age, and found that performance in the strategy games League of Legends and Dota 2 tended to be strongest in players around their mid-twenties – the same age as one’s IQ peaks. This is similar to the behaviour seen for players of traditional strategy games such as chess, where the peak skill follows a similar pattern with age, and for other strategy video games such as Starcraft II.

There was no similar age pattern for the first-person shooters, possibly because skill in these games depends more on speed, target accuracy and operational decision making. MOBAs rely more on working memory and the ability to make strategic decisions. Many of these strategic decisions require the ability to recognise novel patterns based on surroundings and opponents, something that has been linked to a high IQ.

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