Are gamers smarter?

[mythusmage]

Maybe I've had a bad run...

But I've found gamers to be very small minded, egotistical, often prejudiced in one or more ways, and no more intelligent than the masses at large.

The small mindedness, big egos, and predicial nature however tends to make them come across as less intelligent to those not in their fold...

You've been to RPGnet!

 

[Al]

I've read the whole thread, and as always am impressed by fusangite's powerful and indisputable arguments (he ups the average IQ of the gaming community by at least a couple of points )...most of his critics are citing anecdotal (hence inaccurate) evidence, because of their individual frames of reference.

For example, I don't believe that my gaming group are smarter than others within my particular frame-of-reference: but then, I'm at one of the world's top universities (Cambridge, UK) so this distorts the picture. If one were to take a stratified sample of all levels of intelligence, gamers would indeed tend to fall within the upper categories. In general, they have competent mental arithmetic, good imaginative skills, are literate to a high standard and have a strong facility for logical skills and understanding abstract concepts.

 

[EricNoah]

I've had this explained to me once before, but it sounded an awful lot like a hippy "everybody gets to be smart" kind of argument ("Yay! Everybody wins!" to quote The Simpsons)

That's because you only value a couple of kinds of smart, apparently!

 

[Farland]

I know gamers think they are more intelligent, as evinced by the fact that when those stupid "what are your real life stats" threads come up, there isn't one person who rates himself below a 15 in INT. What that says to me, though, is that gamers are NOT more intelligent, because they out to be able to see that by the law of statistics, they likely have a 10-12.

 

[Nareau]

I find it interesting that no one has mentioned the millions of people who never get any formal education at all. I mean no disrespect to the citizens of developing nations when I point out that that people who live in industrialized countries tend to get a lot more education. There's a high corellation between "lots of education" and "the mental ability to learn and understand things".

I think the question would be more useful if it were refined a bit:
"Is the average intelligence of gamers higher than that of comparable populations?"

But even that's a hard one to answer--while most gamers are 15-25, white, upper-middle class, and male, there's a lot of diversity in the gaming community. So figuring out what constitutes a "comparable population" would be difficult.

I agree with fungasite's argument. I'd even go a step further and say that literate people are almost always smarter than non-literate people. If I can read, I am beter able to learn and understand things.

Finally, I think rpg's can be very useful for teaching people how to think quickly and solve problems creatively. My friends and I are constantly commenting on how a some character in some movie "obviously isn't a gamer." Every time someone drops a zombie, then goes and nudges it with their foot to make sure it's dead...I can't help but think that they could have survived had they just played a little CoC in highschool.

Spider

 

[Zander]

I find it interesting that no one has mentioned the millions of people who never get any formal education at all. I mean no disrespect to the citizens of developing nations when I point out that that people who live in industrialized countries tend to get a lot more education. There's a high corellation between "lots of education" and "the mental ability to learn and understand things".

As I mentioned in the first post, we shouldn't fall into the trap of confusing education and intelligence. While highly educated people are normally more intelligent, the absence of formal education is not an indication of a lack of intelligence. I know this not just from anecdotal personal experience (uneducated friends who are clever) but also from formal studies that show your ability in a conventional IQ test is highly correlated with your ability in IQ tests for illiterate people (which are administered by people who can read). Using education or literary ability as proxies for intelligence will capture some, but not all intelligent people.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

I've had this explained to me once before, but it sounded an awful lot like a hippy "everybody gets to be smart" kind of argument ("Yay! Everybody wins!" to quote The Simpsons)

Indeed. This is Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences. You hear about this all the time in schools (I teach, and if I'm not mistaken, Eric works in a school as well). Personally, I believe it is a misguided attack on the idea of intelligence. Gardener and his many converts mean well - they want to help kids - but I think that it is simply an Orwellian corruption of the language and an obfuscation of the main idea.

Case in point: instead of calling a kid a "good athlete," Gardener says the kid "has a high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence." This would be laughable as an example of what Orwell was talking about in "Politics and the English Language" were it not for the fact that Gardener's theory has been extremely successful at stopping all rational debate on intelligence in schools.

Chiefly it has stopped this debate by claiming that things like musical talent and athletic ability are "intelligence." How can one speak clearly about a concept if it has many other different concepts lumped in with it? It would be like arguing about the color pink in a painting, as long as pink also meant green and blue. Impossible to think clearly with such words.

 

[WayneLigon]

What about the gaming community would make one think that its members are in someway more intelligent than the average person? For that matter, what is it about being a gamer that would make a gamer somehow different than an average person? I serious here, I wanna know.

To me, the largest single thing that points to 'more intelligent' is that on the whole gamers read more than the general populace (not counting game books). The average gamer seems to read several books a year, over a wide range of topics. They have sought out more in the way of education (most of my friends have Masters degrees or PhD's, sometimes in more than one subject). They are much more imaginative and mentally adaptable than other people I know.

Alluding to what I said in my first post in the thread, this too has 'gone down' over the years. Now I meet D&D players that have never read much in the way of fantasy (or any) novels; what they know of the genre comes from computer 'rpgs' and (now) the LOTR movies. When I first started in the hobby, that was simply unheard of among the people I knew. Everyone had a large library, often several entire bookcases crammed with stuff. But I think the 'average' is still well-read.

 

[fusangite]

Ycore Rixle says,

Indeed. This is Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences. You hear about this all the time in schools (I teach, and if I'm not mistaken, Eric works in a school as well). Personally, I believe it is a misguided attack on the idea of intelligence. Gardener and his many converts mean well - they want to help kids - but I think that it is simply an Orwellian corruption of the language and an obfuscation of the main idea.

Case in point: instead of calling a kid a "good athlete," Gardener says the kid "has a high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence." This would be laughable as an example of what Orwell was talking about in "Politics and the English Language" were it not for the fact that Gardener's theory has been extremely successful at stopping all rational debate on intelligence in schools.

Chiefly it has stopped this debate by claiming that things like musical talent and athletic ability are "intelligence." How can one speak clearly about a concept if it has many other different concepts lumped in with it? It would be like arguing about the color pink in a painting, as long as pink also meant green and blue. Impossible to think clearly with such words.

Thanks so much for introducing Orwell here. I would actually go a step further and argue that what is really happening is that "intelligent" is being converted into the term "proficient." I would argue that this is as likely to result in increased discrimination against people who are not intelligent as it is to reduce such discrimination.

It reminds me of the colourful history of the terms for people who are not smart. We started with idiot. But then, in the 19th century, people felt that this was a pejorative term. So the medical community came up with a new non-judgemental, non-pejorative term for such people. The term was "moron." Pretty soon, "moron" became an insult. So, then, we came up with a new non-judgemental term: "retarded." After a while, this too became an insult. So, we have a new term, "challenged." Anyone else starting to use the term "challenged" as an insult? My friends certainly are.

I'm quite confident that whatever new terminology we wrap around it, our society will continue to attach negative connotations to whatever term we invent for people who are not clever. Despite all evidence to the contrary in my own life, tbe broad sweep of evidence seems to show that society values cleverness.

 

[Farland]

Yeah, and then try teaching using Gardener's multiple intelligences in a high-level English or philosophy class.

"Yes, I know that our main point here is to teach advanced comprehension, analysis, and synthesis of ideas within texts, but if you want to you can use your bodily kinaesthetic knowledge, Johnny, and act out the concepts within it. Can't act out Plato's theory of Forms? Why ever not? Okay, then, just act out what happens on the surface, the plot."

Yeah, Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences is PC-driven, and very, very flawed.