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
