Are gamers smarter?

[Kichwas]

most of which majored in computer science, mathematics, other hard science fields. In other words, significantly smarter than the average joe.

Having worked in both creative and technical fields, I find people in the hard sciences are really not that intelligent - they just think they are.

The most articulate people I've found to be in creative or soft sciences. These are the ones with all the ideas and ability to think through something new and unexpected.

The hard science crowd is a lot more set in their ways of thinking - something I find to be a character of a lack of intelligence.

 

[diaglo]

i have met gamers that run the whole gamut, if you take into account my limited study set of 158 individuals.

some were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. and some were brain surgeons (literally).

my experience tends to indicate they are just like everyone else. with a standard deviation of ....


edit: every time i see the title to this thread, yogi bear comes to mind.

Boo boo: Ugh, Yogi. The ranger said not to touch the picnic baskets.

Yogiicnic baskets? What picnic baskets. Ah, cluck the ranger, BOo boo. Smarter than your average bear...

 

[Umbran]

The most articulate people I've found to be in creative or soft sciences.

Yes, but here again we wind up in the skill vs ability argument. A person in the hard sciences is likely to have studied language and human interaction, art, and expression much less than a person in the creative fields. And those people in the creative fields cannot manage a multi-dimensional integral to save their lives, while most of my academic department can do so quite handily.
So what you see is what you'd expect - people who study a thing are better at that thing. Not odd in the least.

The hard scientist is quite likely able to think through to something new and unexpected, but like everyone else, they do so with their preferred tools. The creative crowd tends to use language. The harder sciences tend to use math. Same basic idea, but focused upon highly different subject matter.

 

[Djeta Thernadier]

There is a HUGE part of me that wants to say , yeah, we're smarter. But I guess it depends on your definition of "smart" or your definition of "creative". I've known some people with enormously high IQs that can barely dress themselves. I've known some people who could not pass 5th grade math as adults (myself included) but who could write an epic, captivating story or speak fluently in 6 languages. I've known some gamers who were incredibly intelligent but so socially inept and snobbish that no one really wanted to be around them. I've known gamers who were the sweetest people alive. I've known people who were downright idiots.
While I agree that there is a frightening amount of "dumbing down" , I can't say that everyone who games is exempt from it. Nor can I say everyone who doesn't game is not intelligent. In fact, I know some brilliant minds who actually watch moronic shows like Who Wants to Marry my Caricature of Herself Gold-digger Bimbo Aunt (or whatever the latest one is called) who , aside from their strange fixation with reality tv, or what I consider to be ridiculously bad pop music are successful, fun, and smart people.
Me? I have an above average IQ (which to me means nothing other than under the right circumstances, I'm a good test taker). I have no interest in current "pop" culture such as reality tv. I listen to various kinds of music. I like watching history documentaries. I have a lot of useless trivia floating around in my head. I think outside the box (as those business people like to call it). I read a lot of non fiction and classics. I have a vivid imagination.
Does that make me smarter than the guy who fixes your car? Not really. I am terrible at math. My spelling is atrocious. There are plenty of topics I'm just not interested in and know nothing about. I am not very social.
Someone mentioned in an earlier post that gamers are likely to be interested in more intellectual pastimes. I agree. But being interested in intellectual pastimes doesn't really make you smarter.
3 specific non gamers come to my mind. One is a good friend of mine who is currently reading the MM & MM2 because she writes fantasy. She has never really played D&D or any other RPG. She has a great imagination, she is one of the most brilliant women I know. The next is a guy at work who dresses like the cover of GQ every day (we don't quite understand it since no one here dresses that way). He is about as far from D&D as it comes, but, between the way he dresses and the way he knows finances and such, he's a brilliant businessman and I'll be shocked if he isn't the VP of the company in a year. The next is my younger brother who is , IMHO, the smartest, most funny human being alive. He's clever and witty. He has no interest in D&D or RPGS whatsoever.
These 3 folks, as well as the mechanic who just replaced MojoGM's radiator are all smart non-gamers. Is the mechanic smarter than me because he knows an engine inside and out? No. Am I smarter than him because I can tell you more than you'd ever want to know about Ancient Egypt? No. There are so many different fields of interest that people have that it is impossible to really judge if one person is smarter than another. Gamers may just seem smarter to us because we can relate to them...

 

[fusangite]

Umbran,

I think you have misinterpreted what I have said. I did not say that our culture objectively measures intelligence. What I said was that all measures of intelligence are culturally embedded. I agree that measures of intelligence in our culture and in others tend to entail distortions based on cultural factors.

So, if we put someone with high numeracy and literacy skills in an oral culture, they might or might not be measured as smart depending on their aural memory and other skills, only some of which overlap with our culture's measure of intelligence.

However, the fact that there are distortions in a model does not make it useless. I'm not arguing that IQ measures intelligence accurately; all I am doing is positing a positive correlation coefficient between it and intelligence. And that's all I need to do to demonstrate that my model functions. Similarly, with proficiency in a hobby, all I am arguing for is a positive correlation coefficient in order for my model to work; at no time do I suggest a one to one correspondence.

Finally, as for barriers to entry. I agree: I am suggesting that the vast majority of the population can clear our barriers to entry. Remember, I'm not arguing for a considerable difference in intelligence between gamers and the average population -- I'm arguing for a difference. The fact that our hobby's skill requirements has effective barriers to entry that are intelligence-related, again, is sufficient.

I am not suggesting that gamers are a community I would characterize as exceptionally bright. All I am doing is answering the question of the thread in the affirmative: on average, gamers are smarter.

It seems we're talking about problems of economics, social status, and public education methods than we are about intelligence. That's politics, and we probably shouldn't go there.

I agree that we should not politicize the debate excessively. But, if you asked me whether gamers tend to be more middle class than average, I would also answer in the affirmative.

I think the problem with this debate is that gamers are a community that tends to conflate "intelligence" with some kind of absolute value or worth as a person. The tone of this debate suggests to me that the gaming community values intelligence more highly than any of the other D&D attributes. Because people see it is so strongly linked to worth as a person, their elitist or egalitarian politics are played out in the context of this debate. Somehow, people with egalitarian worldviews find themselves needing to argue for a culturally transcendent theory of intelligence, stripped of all distortions and apportioned as equally as possible across the population because they see intelligence as having something to do with citizenship or value. Similarly, in so many elitist posts on this thread, we see people conflating their worth as a person with their perceived superior intelligence. Smarter does not equal better nor does it equal "capable of succeeding"; most human attributes require use of the brain -- that doesn't mean you can collapse most human attributes into the category intelligence.

To digress briefly into politics, I associate this problem with the New Left belief in "participatory democracy." We can see this problem really clearly in, for instance, Murray Bookchin's Remaking Society when the author, in describing the shift to a democratic, egalitarian, sustainable society also states that when the shift to this new society takes place, everyone in the world's intelligence will increase to the same level as his.

I do not hold with that. I am an egalitarian; I believe that my late uncle whose IQ was 47 had the same worth and entitlements as a human being as I do. It took a few years to come to that belief, though, because I used to value myself based on my intelligence. Once I was able to separate my belief that I was smart from my desire to feel self worth, then I could make that leap. But the tone of this thread seems to suggest that my belief system is the exception rather than the rule.

Despite the high value our society places on intelligence in its rhetoric, frankly, as D&D attributes go, Constitution (e.g. Fortitude saves vs. cancer) and Charisma matter a whole lot more difference in terms of getting through the day and being a successful person in our civilization.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Jocks are smarter too.

I firmly believe that gamers are, in fact, a superior group of people to the "masses" simply by the fact that they are a self-selected group: There are inherent entry barriers to becoming one. The same applies to any *OTHER* selected hobbyist group. There's simply a cutoff point beyond which somebody is simply incapable of even stumbling through the hobby to serve as an object of ridicule and mockery to his peers. Anytime you have a selective group of people, those people are in some way, as an average, above the "masses" in whatever attributes that the hobby emphasizes.

I would say the same is true about most high school baseball players. Probably true about jocks in general. To make most high school teams at bigger schools you have to be in the top 50%-70% of talent at the tryouts, and that is an already self selected group -- the less able loss interest during the years of training before reaching that level.

Mental ability is every bit as important as raw physical talent to excel in sports. There just aren't many genuinely mentally impaired individuals who become talented athletes. A number of them are really sharp.

Now, insofar as the stereotype goes, I admit a goodly portion of the typical sports team includes a number of %$#@ jerks who couldn't give a rat's behind about book learning. But they are still, on average, a more mentally gifted lot than the masses, even if they do not exercise their brains on conceptual knowledge.

 

[Umbran]

However, the fact that there are distortions in a model does not make it useless. I'm not arguing that IQ measures intelligence accurately; all I am doing is positing a positive correlation coefficient between it and intelligence. And that's all I need to do to demonstrate that my model functions.

Incorrect. As is, your model is subject to confounding bias. You need to show that IQ has positive correlation to intelligence and to no other confounding factors. Because correlation alone does not imply causation.

I agree that we should not politicize the debate excessively. But, if you asked me whether gamers tend to be more middle class than average, I would also answer in the affirmative.

And here is one major possible confounding bias. Some folks claim that IQ tests positively correlate to intelligence. However, we know they also correlate to economic status and education. People in middle to upper economic classes tend to do better on IQ tests, as do people with higher levels of education.

So, perhaps gamers have higher IQ scores. I've seen no actual proof of this, but let's assume it is true. Perhaps that's because they tend to be smarter. Perhaps it is because they tend to be from middle to upper classes, or more highly educated. With only the one measure, we cannot single out which one is the actual cause of the elevated IQ of the sample.

 

[Xeriar]

RPGs do have some basic entry barriers. You need junior high school literacy to read the rulebooks. You need the most basic of math skills (addition and subtraction, usually of numbers less than about 20). Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that being good at these skills makes one more likely to be a gamer. The question is, though, if being good at those skills has much to do with intelligence.

An IQ test typically tests 3 forms of intelligence, visual-perceptive, logical-mathematical, and language. The last is usually weighted the heaviest because it supposedly has the highest correllation, but this tends to come under a lot of fire.

Most of these language tests don't include the 'jargon' that gamers are often familiar with, and a gamer, legal, medical, history, computer or military expert will probably be biased against in such tests, because while they may have done the same amount of reading, their chosen feild means they are likely going to ace a subset or two of the language test and do average or below average at the rest.

For gamers, many people on the umm, low end of the linguistic range and lower end of the mathematical-logical range will get weeded out, while those who are on the higher end of these spectrums will have more exposure.

I think the exposure is probably the bigger factor - you go to college and don't hang out with the frat crowd, assuming you have some sliver of sociability you will likely run into gaming at some point.

For the average of gamers as a whole, I highly doubt it's more than a full standard devitation higher than the general populace (int or wis 14 or whatever). I can see 11 or 12 or so. The most ignorant of gamers I've known are still smarter than some of the poor individuals I've met on the streets of Rapid City.

 

[Al'Kelhar]

Okay, let me ask this on the flip side - were there intelligent people before the invention of written language?

Shouldn't the question be "was the average human intelligence before the invention of written language as high as it is now"? To which the answer is probably "no". From studies done on IQ tests taken over the last half century, it would appear that human beings are collectively becoming better - that is, faster and more accurate - at solving the sorts of problems which IQ tests pose. The rationale appears to be that the rapid increase in the complexity of 1st world society has led to a rapid increase in the ability of our brains to deal with that complexity. If one adopts this theory that intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) is positively correlated with environmental complexity, then yes, the average human living in the modern 1st world is more intelligent than his forebears - and, for all you egalitarian philosophers out there - more intelligent than the average human living today in a less complex environment.

I am an egalitarian; I believe that my late uncle whose IQ was 47 had the same worth and entitlements as a human being as I do. It took a few years to come to that belief, though, because I used to value myself based on my intelligence. Once I was able to separate my belief that I was smart from my desire to feel self worth, then I could make that leap. But the tone of this thread seems to suggest that my belief system is the exception rather than the rule.

Indeed. Personally I am a Darwinian elitist. I'm with Teflon Billy on the whole pinko lefty tree-hugging everyone-is-equal crap. I value intelligence very highly. And oddly enough, I'd probably get along famously with people like Umbran and fusangite, despite their personal views differing from mine - by the nature and content of their posts they are thoughtful, critical, intelligent people. It's the masses who scream about immigrants taking their jobs and how gun ownership makes people safe who would be the first to be shot under my New World Order based on ability to rationally analyse a set of facts and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

 

[fusangite]

Umbran says,

Incorrect. As is, your model is subject to confounding bias. You need to show that IQ has positive correlation to intelligence and to no other confounding factors. Because correlation alone does not imply causation.

Where did causation suddenly show up from? I'm not saying intelligence causes a good IQ test score; I'm saying it positively correlates to one. First off, let's take IQ right out of the model. It's an unnecessary intermediate step. Literacy and numeracy competence correlate with playing RPGs; that's my case. I make it based on a barriers to entry argument and on an argument of being good at a hobby and wanting to do it positively correlating. Causation shows up nowhere in my model; my model is only about correlation.

Al'Kelhar says,

Indeed. Personally I am a Darwinian elitist. I'm with Teflon Billy on the whole pinko lefty tree-hugging everyone-is-equal crap. I value intelligence very highly. And oddly enough, I'd probably get along famously with people like Umbran and fusangite, despite their personal views differing from mine - by the nature and content of their posts they are thoughtful, critical, intelligent people. It's the masses who scream about immigrants taking their jobs and how gun ownership makes people safe who would be the first to be shot under my New World Order based on ability to rationally analyse a set of facts and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Let us know when next you're in Vancouver; you sound like a fine conversationalist. TB is not my only friend of a radically different political persuasion. Besides, valuing everyone equally doesn't mean that I enjoy spending time with everyone equally. Like so many lefty tree-hugging pinkos I too am an intellectual snob; unlike most of them, I can integrate that into my ideology rather than living in denial.