Abstract
Hundreds of millions of people play intellectually-demanding video games every day. What does individual performance on these games tell us about cognition? Here, we describe two studies that examine the potential link between intelligence and performance in one of the most popular video games genres in the world (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas: MOBAs). In the first study, we show that performance in the popular MOBA League of Legends’ correlates with fluid intelligence as measured under controlled laboratory conditions. In the second study, we also show that the age profile of performance in the two most widely-played MOBAs (League of Legends and DOTA II) matches that of raw fluid intelligence. We discuss and extend previous videogame literature on intelligence and videogames and suggest that commercial video games can be useful as 'proxy' tests of cognitive performance at a global population level.
Highlights
Games of strategy, such as chess or mancala, can be found across cultures and skilled performance in these games has been associated with intelligence [1,2,3,4] historically
This notion was extended to the domain of video games by Rabbitt et al [10] who correlated scores from the Alice-Heim (AH-4) IQ test with performance in ‘Space Fortress’; an arcade-like single player game developed by psychologists [11,12,13]
We describe an experiment in which we measure psychometric factors related to intelligence in individual players under laboratory conditions and correlate these factors with players’ ranks in the popular commercial Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas’ (MOBAs) ‘League of Legends’ (LoL) [26]
Summary
Games of strategy, such as chess or mancala, can be found across cultures and skilled performance in these games has been associated with intelligence [1,2,3,4] historically Spitz formalized this connection with specific subpopulations, pointing out that performance in a wide variety of strategy games such as Tic-Tac-Toe or the Towers of Hanoi can be linked to mental ability [3,5]. He went on to suggest that strategy games tap a number of facets of intelligence: visualization of possible moves, short-term memory rehearsal and the ability delay immediate gratification to increase future rewards (for example, sacrificing a piece in chess in order to win the game in a later turn) [1]. While individual player IQs did not predict initial performance in Space Fortress, they did predict learning rates and, performance once players had engaged with the game long enough to become
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