Sure, as long as the video game isn’t heavily loaded on timing, reaction time, hand-eye-coordination, and experience. (I’m aware that these correlate to intelligence as well, but people who’ve played a lot of videogames will do much better on these, even if they’re not inherently smarter)
I’ve actually been using games to estimate the intelligence of people, and my intuition has never been far off, I can guess the results of my friends fairly accurately. All my bright friends do well on games we play, learning them quickly and performing well. Even verbal ability seems to correlate. This correlation is even better than income and languages spoken, though those two correlations are solid too. Your friends with 5000$ PCs are likely more than 1SD above the mean. Being in a well-off family is already a sign of good genes running in that family.
Intelligent people in my family are surprisingly good at card games and trivia games. Also dice games, even when it seems like luck places a hard limit on performance.
Another area where videogames are useful is diagnosing skewed cognitive profiles. I do very well in older shooters with simple graphics, and I’m absolutely trash in Overwatch and Apex. It feels clunky and I think my specs might be too low, resulting in input lag. Still, I’ve narrowed down the cause to the visual effects, I simply don’t process large amounts of visual information well. In older games, a single moving pixel means that there’s an enemy. In newer games, everything moves, from the grass to the background.
I don’t think there’s a very large burden of proof on you here, it would be weird to evaluate this idea as if it was unlikely. If anything it’s almost obvious that video game performance correlate strongly with intelligence. The data is rather fuzzy though (I’m lacking a word here, but essentially it’s difficult to reverse-engineer the results into the factors which explain/cause them)
Finally, I think the only issue with IQ tests is that people reduce intelligence to a single number. That’s like reducing your computer specs to a single number, you’ll have big a loss of information. So of course people have evidence (personal experiences) of IQ test scores failing them as predictors. I think 5 numbers is enough to cover most nuances and prevent large differences not explainable by numbers.
Which other games did you use to estimate the intelligence of people, ad do you do it only by watching their learning curves or seeing their twitch.tv streams?
What older shooters do you do well in? Counterstrike is one of the hardest ever. Overwatch makes it easier for newbies to have even K/D ratios than many other games (TF2 historically also did, as did Star Wars Battlefront (3rd one), but not Call of Duty and especially not Battlefield)
Intelligence is general enough for most games. Most of them are just people that I play together with, but a few post on Twitter quite often. My friends also have a high rate of being streamers (~10%) but that might be a coincidence as that’s not how I met them.
At times some person will impress me, and then next week I see them post about entering the global top 1000 of Apex or whatever. I do well in older counter-strike games and games like TF2 and Paladins. My reaction time is better than what should be possible (humanbenchmark 117ms), so I mainly play sniper. Used to play CS source on those surf servers with points and leveling, and upgrade until other people would lose the ability to control their movement due to going too fast. In TF2 I had to move team every 5 minutes, in order not to destroy the team balance, even on 32-player servers.
I’m not good at Overwatch, but I used to play it with my friends who were top 0.1% Elo in Paladins, and they performed just as well in Overwatch, even with me on their team to drag them down a bit. I played just one class but they were good with any.
Some people get stuck for a while in gunfire reborn, others only need a few re-runs to find a game-breaking strategy. But if I play co-op puzzle games with my friends, we never get stuck. At worst we pause for 10-20 seconds and then go “alright, got it now”.
Recently watched a friend playing “Patrick’s Parabox” and from what I could tell he reached some of the hardest levels before slowing down. When I sent him the Mensa.dk IQ test he scored 135 on it.
I can’t tell you which game works best as an IQ test, so this comment is likely disappointing, but performance generalizes well so most games should be good enough. There are exceptions for myself, but only because my cognitive balance is bad (autism) which leads to bottlenecks. A good candidate game is Ark though, it has a bit of everything. Exploration, exploitation, tracking, planning, etc.
You seem interested in the idea of improving intelligence with nootropics? But that’s like overclocking. It gets the most out of hardware, but why not improve the hardware instead? If you want an interesting idea to work with, synesthesia is one, since learning is relational and some forms of memory (visual and spatial) can contain much more information than the standard 7 items. I believe that mental visualization is how chess players can keep track of 30+ items at a time with training. Synesthesia correlates with learning speed, but there must be evolutionary reasons for its rarity, i.e. disadvantages.
My working memory sort of sucks, but in TF2 I noticed that I could “feel” when enemies would respawn, and track their general location. I’d also know their line of sight (mental ray tracing), which has disadvantages now as I feel watched if I don’t close my curtains all the way.
Just logged into my second account, my reaction time is 106ms. Maybe it’s anxiety, maybe it’s nerve damage. The arealme test gives better times than humanbenchmark, and I’ve been able to get below 100ms on it before without cheating.
For the first account, it’s 120ms. My first scores were bad, and the final score is the average of all submitted scores, I think. I’m sluggish right now so I can’t go faster than 135ms. Aim trainer 95% Verbal Memory 287 points (100.0%)
Other scores are deleted. My old account was probably on a throwaway email which is gone now. But I made it a goal to get top 99.9% in all tests, and I did at least that (10 years ago I think). Number memory I got 12 but now I don’t think I could get more than 8 on average, my working memory has gotten worse and I’m not sure how to train it again.
The tests are too hardware specific, and technique-specific. For verbal memory, connect the word you see with something, creating a one-way hash. If you try to create the same hash twice, you will notice. This type of memory is basically unlimited. I remember a study about people being shown a lot of images briefly, maybe not even a second, and being able to tell if they had seen them before with 80% accuracy. They did this for like months, having shown over 20000 images in total with no loss in recall.
I don’t remember the exact figures, and I can’t find the study now. But the problem with memory is recall, and if the test doesn’t require two-way association, then it’s not really memory.
For visual memory, just sit still. The image will remain on your retina. This is cheating and thus not interesting.
Now, I’m no genius by any means. I did one try on the chimp test, and while I did it half-assedly, I got below average.
On brainlabs.me I get between average and top 0.1%. I don’t play RTS. Lately I’m running on auto-pilot most of the time, some days ADHD medicine helps me think, other days it’s useless. IQ points seem to fall about 15-20 points when one is on vacation, and I think my brain is on vacation-mode. My cognition has gotten lazy and I really need to fix that. I don’t think I put effort into anything for years now, since my intuition usually carries me through everything well enough.
It feels like I’ve always been halfway genius and halfway mentally challenged. At times I’ve improved so much that I couldn’t recognize myself in just a week, at other times I struggle with basics. Could be a mix of ADHD and bipolar, so that I have months of being “stuck” and months of energy according to how well my neurotransmitters like me doing that period.
My experiences make for interesting data, but probably not useful data. I’m an anomaly who is only functional 5% of the time, but 5% is somehow enough, so I guess that’s impressive.
Sure, as long as the video game isn’t heavily loaded on timing, reaction time, hand-eye-coordination, and experience. (I’m aware that these correlate to intelligence as well, but people who’ve played a lot of videogames will do much better on these, even if they’re not inherently smarter)
I’ve actually been using games to estimate the intelligence of people, and my intuition has never been far off, I can guess the results of my friends fairly accurately. All my bright friends do well on games we play, learning them quickly and performing well. Even verbal ability seems to correlate. This correlation is even better than income and languages spoken, though those two correlations are solid too. Your friends with 5000$ PCs are likely more than 1SD above the mean. Being in a well-off family is already a sign of good genes running in that family.
Intelligent people in my family are surprisingly good at card games and trivia games. Also dice games, even when it seems like luck places a hard limit on performance.
Another area where videogames are useful is diagnosing skewed cognitive profiles. I do very well in older shooters with simple graphics, and I’m absolutely trash in Overwatch and Apex. It feels clunky and I think my specs might be too low, resulting in input lag. Still, I’ve narrowed down the cause to the visual effects, I simply don’t process large amounts of visual information well. In older games, a single moving pixel means that there’s an enemy. In newer games, everything moves, from the grass to the background.
I don’t think there’s a very large burden of proof on you here, it would be weird to evaluate this idea as if it was unlikely. If anything it’s almost obvious that video game performance correlate strongly with intelligence. The data is rather fuzzy though (I’m lacking a word here, but essentially it’s difficult to reverse-engineer the results into the factors which explain/cause them)
Finally, I think the only issue with IQ tests is that people reduce intelligence to a single number. That’s like reducing your computer specs to a single number, you’ll have big a loss of information. So of course people have evidence (personal experiences) of IQ test scores failing them as predictors. I think 5 numbers is enough to cover most nuances and prevent large differences not explainable by numbers.
Which other games did you use to estimate the intelligence of people, ad do you do it only by watching their learning curves or seeing their twitch.tv streams?
What older shooters do you do well in? Counterstrike is one of the hardest ever. Overwatch makes it easier for newbies to have even K/D ratios than many other games (TF2 historically also did, as did Star Wars Battlefront (3rd one), but not Call of Duty and especially not Battlefield)
Intelligence is general enough for most games. Most of them are just people that I play together with, but a few post on Twitter quite often. My friends also have a high rate of being streamers (~10%) but that might be a coincidence as that’s not how I met them.
At times some person will impress me, and then next week I see them post about entering the global top 1000 of Apex or whatever.
I do well in older counter-strike games and games like TF2 and Paladins. My reaction time is better than what should be possible (humanbenchmark 117ms), so I mainly play sniper. Used to play CS source on those surf servers with points and leveling, and upgrade until other people would lose the ability to control their movement due to going too fast.
In TF2 I had to move team every 5 minutes, in order not to destroy the team balance, even on 32-player servers.
I’m not good at Overwatch, but I used to play it with my friends who were top 0.1% Elo in Paladins, and they performed just as well in Overwatch, even with me on their team to drag them down a bit. I played just one class but they were good with any.
Some people get stuck for a while in gunfire reborn, others only need a few re-runs to find a game-breaking strategy. But if I play co-op puzzle games with my friends, we never get stuck. At worst we pause for 10-20 seconds and then go “alright, got it now”.
Recently watched a friend playing “Patrick’s Parabox” and from what I could tell he reached some of the hardest levels before slowing down. When I sent him the Mensa.dk IQ test he scored 135 on it.
I can’t tell you which game works best as an IQ test, so this comment is likely disappointing, but performance generalizes well so most games should be good enough. There are exceptions for myself, but only because my cognitive balance is bad (autism) which leads to bottlenecks. A good candidate game is Ark though, it has a bit of everything. Exploration, exploitation, tracking, planning, etc.
You seem interested in the idea of improving intelligence with nootropics? But that’s like overclocking. It gets the most out of hardware, but why not improve the hardware instead? If you want an interesting idea to work with, synesthesia is one, since learning is relational and some forms of memory (visual and spatial) can contain much more information than the standard 7 items. I believe that mental visualization is how chess players can keep track of 30+ items at a time with training. Synesthesia correlates with learning speed, but there must be evolutionary reasons for its rarity, i.e. disadvantages.
My working memory sort of sucks, but in TF2 I noticed that I could “feel” when enemies would respawn, and track their general location. I’d also know their line of sight (mental ray tracing), which has disadvantages now as I feel watched if I don’t close my curtains all the way.
Wow, what are your other scores on humanbenchmark? Have your skills changed with age? Do you play RTS or games other than standard FPS?
Just logged into my second account, my reaction time is 106ms. Maybe it’s anxiety, maybe it’s nerve damage. The arealme test gives better times than humanbenchmark, and I’ve been able to get below 100ms on it before without cheating.
For the first account, it’s 120ms. My first scores were bad, and the final score is the average of all submitted scores, I think. I’m sluggish right now so I can’t go faster than 135ms.
Aim trainer 95%
Verbal Memory 287 points (100.0%)
Other scores are deleted. My old account was probably on a throwaway email which is gone now. But I made it a goal to get top 99.9% in all tests, and I did at least that (10 years ago I think). Number memory I got 12 but now I don’t think I could get more than 8 on average, my working memory has gotten worse and I’m not sure how to train it again.
The tests are too hardware specific, and technique-specific. For verbal memory, connect the word you see with something, creating a one-way hash. If you try to create the same hash twice, you will notice. This type of memory is basically unlimited. I remember a study about people being shown a lot of images briefly, maybe not even a second, and being able to tell if they had seen them before with 80% accuracy. They did this for like months, having shown over 20000 images in total with no loss in recall.
I don’t remember the exact figures, and I can’t find the study now. But the problem with memory is recall, and if the test doesn’t require two-way association, then it’s not really memory.
For visual memory, just sit still. The image will remain on your retina. This is cheating and thus not interesting.
Now, I’m no genius by any means. I did one try on the chimp test, and while I did it half-assedly, I got below average.
On brainlabs.me I get between average and top 0.1%. I don’t play RTS. Lately I’m running on auto-pilot most of the time, some days ADHD medicine helps me think, other days it’s useless. IQ points seem to fall about 15-20 points when one is on vacation, and I think my brain is on vacation-mode. My cognition has gotten lazy and I really need to fix that. I don’t think I put effort into anything for years now, since my intuition usually carries me through everything well enough.
It feels like I’ve always been halfway genius and halfway mentally challenged. At times I’ve improved so much that I couldn’t recognize myself in just a week, at other times I struggle with basics. Could be a mix of ADHD and bipolar, so that I have months of being “stuck” and months of energy according to how well my neurotransmitters like me doing that period.
My experiences make for interesting data, but probably not useful data. I’m an anomaly who is only functional 5% of the time, but 5% is somehow enough, so I guess that’s impressive.