Well, reading the PDF was anticlimactic. Why? Because page 2 of the PDF describes the 12 games that were used. They were games that test memorization, puzzle completion, and pattern matching.<p>In other words, the "commercial video games" used in their research were "brain games" and not Pac-Man, Mario Bros, and Call of Duty, etc.<p>If you've ever taken a <i>real</i> IQ test where the proxy shows you cards to match or pictures with "missing" data, the 12 video games they used are very similar in spirit. It's not surprising that there is high correlation between the scores of those particular types of video games and real IQ tests.<p>However, that's not to say there is zero correlation between blockbuster video games like Call of Duty and IQ. Maybe another study will pursue that.
A year and a half back, when I was in the 10th grade, I did some similar research on the effects of video games on the cognitive skills of students. I specifically designed games for this research. I wanted to further this study to test commercially available video games, but due to lack of support and finance, I could not (I'm still in high school).<p>You can go through the paper here if you want: <a href="http://www.emerginginvestigators.org/2015/01/gaming-cognitive-skills/" rel="nofollow">http://www.emerginginvestigators.org/2015/01/gaming-cognitiv...</a> OR <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01665" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01665</a><p>TL;DR; of the paper: I divided the class into two groups, one that played the video games and one that did not. Two tests were taken - one before the children were allowed to play games and another at the completion of one week. Children were made to play games for an hour daily. The results showed that gaming does improve cognitive skills. I was particularly surprised by the substantial improvement that it led to in scores.<p>PS: Anyone who wants to take this further or maybe has ideas for implementing this, please feel free contact me. I would love to help you out on this.
Maybe a better summary of this paper would be "IQ tests presented on a computer screen produce scores highly correlated to IQ tests presented on paper," since they didn't use what you would normally call "video games."
Was thinking this knowledge could be used as a recruiting tool, then immediately this came to mind...<p>"Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada..."
They are already used for that purpose:<p>"The largest human cognitive performance dataset reveals insights into the effects of lifestyle factors and aging" Daniel A. Sternberg, Kacey Ballard, Joseph L. Hardy, Benjamin Katz, P. Murali Doraiswamy and Michael Scanlon,
Front. Hum. Neurosci., 20 June 2013
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00292" rel="nofollow">http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00292</a>
One addendum here is that you can use them to measure g, but as soon as you start trying to use them to <i>improve</i> g any value of g you measure using them will be incorrect due to learning effects and there is no reliable evidence that playing such games can improve g. Source: wrote my prelims on this.
reliably <> accurately<p>Wow, some psychology professor who read Ender's Game (Probably watched it since, come on, psychology is science at its laziest and the timeframes match) decided to make a quick buck by publishing an online paywalled paper on the "discovery" "for the first time" that people give up signs of their intelligence when observed performing an activity that requires them to use it (which matches the description of an infinite number of activities...).<p>Hey, I can reliably measure your intelligence by reading your comments on Hacker News. May I have your cash-money bucks, please? $_$ I have been working hard with hundreds of my students to prove it! For the first time ever! $_$<p>The fact is that you need specifically designed games for an accurate test. Most video games just won't make the cut. Even a combination of them: take the top 10 from steam. I dare anyone to accurately measure the IQ of their players just by looking at them them play in whatever lab environment they want. An those would be pretty boring. They would be in fact, tests.
> Here we show, for the very first time, that commercial video games can be used to reliably measure individual differences in general intelligence (g). One hundred and eighty eight university undergraduates took part in the study.<p>Is this a joke? <i>reliably measure</i> ? <i>188 students</i>?
So are you trying to tell me that if I could play Call of Duty with A. Einstein I would be humiliated despite him never having played a video game in his entire life?