Are gamers smarter?

EricNoah · Nov 12, 2003

Folks, I'm gonna ask you to please tone down the political rhetoric, ok? Thanks.

Nifft · Nov 12, 2003

I am a gamer, and I am smart (and handsome, and modest, and well-dressed, and completely unbiased.)

-- N

Desdichado · Nov 12, 2003

fusangite said:
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.

For some reason this really made me laugh. I was just thinking about tree-hugging pinko intellectual snobs while reading the China Mieville/JRR Tolkien thread in Sci-fi fantasy. Another Vancouverite has been running with that thread for some time.

In fact, y'all might get a kick out of the thread, right here if I remembered the thread number correctly.

jasper · Nov 12, 2003

No. If you could throw the lot of us into a IQ test place, I think the curve would be the normal bell curve.
Do we make lots and lots of money like the managers of high end stores, race car drivers, actors etc?
Do we get articles written on us in News week, (maybe news geek), time, etc.
NO!
Did we all get A's in high school? no.
Are we more creative? No I seen people do much more with HO trains, C & W collections, cut glass collectors etc.

Djeta Thernadier · Nov 12, 2003

Ridley's Cohort said:
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.

This makes me think of a guy who is a professional wrestler (or was) who also frequently appears on Neil Cavuto's financial show on Fox to discuss the stock market, because aside from being a pro wrestler, he's also a financial advisor.

I really think there are smart people, and complete idiots in every field.

Mark Chance · Nov 12, 2003

As should have been pointed out, gamers aren't necessarily smarter, but I am. I am also a gamer. For too long other gamers have been trying to ride my intellectual bandwagon. Please stop.

Kalanyr · Nov 12, 2003

jasper said:
No. If you could throw the lot of us into a IQ test place, I think the curve would be the normal bell curve.
Do we make lots and lots of money like the managers of high end stores, race car drivers, actors etc?
Do we get articles written on us in News week, (maybe news geek), time, etc.
NO!
Did we all get A's in high school? no.
Are we more creative? No I seen people do much more with HO trains, C & W collections, cut glass collectors etc.

I won't comment on the first since I certainly have no clue about it. But the 2nd seems more related to your ability to impress people and hence get high paying jobs which is more tied into personal charisma (or desipite the value society apparently places on intelligence remember that sports do tend to get more attention than intellectual pursuits from most forms of news coverage which indiciates people are more interested in the physical than the intellectual and hence there's more pay in the physical side) than intelligence. For the 3rd there's a heck of a lot of people doing hideously complex research into things that will never get mentioned on News Week because a) Its of no value to Society unless its successful or b) Its something people in general don't care about. As for the 4th, assuming that the grading system used in High School is correct you don't need an A average to be smarter than average in high school you'd only need a C+/B- average <- before someone says somethng about the grading system I'll just say there's a reason why I said assuming. And for the last I have no clue, I don't consider myself overly creative.

Xeriar · Nov 12, 2003

Mark Chance said:
As should have been pointed out, gamers aren't necessarily smarter, but I am. I am also a gamer. For too long other gamers have been trying to ride my intellectual bandwagon. Please stop.

For the record, I dig your new avatar. Please don't go back to your old one

Umbran · Nov 12, 2003

fusangite said:
Where did causation suddenly show up from?

It's not sudden at all. It's ben rather implicit in your argument in a couple of places. One weakly, the other far more strongly.

Let's take the weak one first:

I'm not saying intelligence causes a good IQ test score; I'm saying it positively correlates to one.

Take a person (person A), of average intelligence. Pick person B at random from the population. There's a probability P (since A is average, P=50%), that person B will be more intelligent than A.

Now, pick person B' from the population, based upon the fact that B' has a higher IQ than A. There's some probability P' that he will be more intelligent than A. The correlation between IQ and intelligence means that P'>P. It does not ensure B' is smarter, it only indicates it is more likely.

So, if IQ correlates to intelligence, and gamers have higher than average IQ, then the probability that they are more intelligent than average is greater than the probability that a similarly sized group picked at random will be more intelligent than average. Extending that to saying gamers *will* be more intelligent is a weak form of causation argument.

However, far more strongly:

IQ correlates to many things. Intelligence may be one. Economic and educational status are others. Saying that higher IQ indicates higher intelligence instead of the others chooses intelligence as the particular cause of the sample's higher IQ. When, statistically speaking, it may be that gamers are of lower intelligence, but generally higher educational and/or economic status, and we'd see the same elevated IQ.

Simply put - there are many possible sources of elevated IQ. You singled out one. That's an implicit causation argument.

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.

Same problem as with IQ. Literacy and numeracy competence may correleate with intelligence. But they also correlate with economic and educational status, among other things. So, those barriers may be selecting for intelligence. But they may be selecting us to be middle class or highly educated, something else, or a mixture of things. We cannot say which one. If we try to claim one over the others, we are making an implicit claim as to causation.