Are map-games for high IQ people?

Video Games and IQ

A few years ago, a good friend shared an observation with me: “every smart person I know likes map and strategy games the most.” I had sensed this intuitively but never properly articulated it. The claim seemed logical, yet when I went looking for confirmation, Google turned up nothing, leaving it as one of those observations that feels true but cannot be supported by empirical data, backed by nothing more than our lived experiences and anecdotes.

Best you could find is some occasional article from questionable Ukrainian news source about which gamers have the highest IQ. In case you were wondering, here is what they have gotten:

My immediate criticism of any such list is this: if 50% of Among Us or Rainbow Six Siege players had IQs above 119, most of them would presumably be running the world. There is simply no way a mass-market game like Among Us, let alone Minecraft could cluster at a median IQ of 117 when the global average sits somewhere between 80 and 83. The math just doesn’t add up. We do not have a billion people with IQs above 117 spending their leisure time exclusively on Minecraft and Amogus.

Another article I was browsing has returned with the following estimations: my personal experience in playing Counter Strike left me with an impression that only an uncivilized goy-cattle could play anything like that. The community was toxic and there was barely any thought or strategy put into these games.

Dota 2 and League of Legends are mostly played by tech bros, dorks and other autists so this may be true, although I doubt that their average IQ is higher than 110. At any rate, none of these games featured proper strategy games to likes of Total War, Civilization, Command and Conquer, a city-simulator game, Heroes of Might and Magic or anything by Paradox. You know… the games that I actually liked.

Occasionally these lists do include strategy games but at the same time the average IQ scores they assign to players don’t map up to reality.

It was all true until today, when I stumbled across an actual peer-reviewed study on the subject. Published in 2024 in Behavioral and Brain Functions, Vo et al. ran a proper longitudinal study on 1,241 adults, all of whom had their IQ tested as teenagers and were then surveyed decades later about their gaming habits. The researchers split games into two broad categories: Action+ (shooters, sports games, real-time strategy like StarCraft) and Puzzle+ (turn-based strategy, life simulation, classic puzzle games).

My problem with methodology is their decision to group StarCraft in “Action+” while grouping Civilization and Hearthstone into “Puzzle+”. Anyone who has played both games will tell you StarCraft demands more strategic thinking than half the titles in the Puzzle+ list. Given their inability to properly categorize video games into their respective categories and the specific division into “action+” and “puzzle+” (who the fuck plays puzzle or would assume that Civilization is a puzzle game), I knew that the study was conducted by a woman.

I was right.

But anyways, this is at least something that we can use to make accurate claims about gamer preferences and intelligence.

First finding is that the full sample of 1,241 adults, gamers had a mean adolescent IQ of 112.8 versus 109.1 for non-gamers. In other-words, gamers are about 4 IQ points higher than non-gamers (~99 vs ~103 if we want to be more realistic). More importantly, when the researchers ran the logistic regression to find out what actually predicted genre preference, adolescent IQ came up as a significant predictor of Puzzle+ and not Action+ genre of games. Puzzle+ players have also outperformed on processing speed tasks at r = 0.19 on Digit Symbol (p < 0.0001), with a Cohen’s d of 0.24 compared to all other players.

Unfortunately they don’t provide accurate IQ approximations for Puzzle+ and Action+ players, so I had to do the work myself and here is what I found:

Strategy and puzzle games enjoyers are 6 IQ points higher than non-gamers, 5 IQ points higher than action gamers and 2 IQ points higher than gamers overall.

I’m glad that my early logical speculation has received the first realistic confirmation, however the methodology sucked massively.

For a study like this to be conducted properly, multiple well-defined categories would need to be established and tested for the IQ of their respective player bases, here is an example:

Turn based map games

FPS and TPS

Simulators

RPG

RTS

Horror games

Indie games

Open world games

Survival games

MMO

Sports games

Fighting games

Arcade

Perhaps someone like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard or Sebastian Jensen could become the first person to properly explore this topic and actually solve the debate over which gamers have the highest IQs.