Playing video games boosts IQ in children

The HN title (&quot;Playing video games boosts IQ in children&quot;) is editorialized and is directly contradicted by the article:<p>&gt; While the difference in cognitive abilities was a small one and isn&#x27;t enough to show a causal relationship, it is enough to be notable<p>The original title wasn&#x27;t <i>much</i> better (&quot;Playing Video Games Has an Unexpected Effect on Kids&#x27; IQ, Says Study&quot;), but it was somewhat better and should have been used instead. As submitted it sounds like someone did a controlled trial and established causality.<p>I&#x27;m glad to see this research done, played a lot of video games growing up and am a strong skeptic of the fear of video games. But pushing conclusions that aren&#x27;t actually backed yet by the science can backfire in the long run, so it&#x27;s important to state the claims accurately.

I can attest to letting my kid play Minecraft, install whatever mods he wants (at 6-7) and watch related tutorials has catapulted his English (not his native language) to insane levels. Playing with the Create Mod is basically just engineering. I do feel conflicted about how much screen time he gets but compared to how I spent my time as a kid, watching shitty soap operas on TV in the afternoons (because that&#x27;s what was on), this is infinitely better. How can I be mad when he&#x27;s throwing around words like &quot;non-euclidean&quot;? He&#x27;s learning WAY more from Minecraft than school at this point. As a bonus, we&#x27;re practically neighbors with Mojang, and visited them on a sick day once.

<i>&gt; the study only looked at children in the US and did not differentiate between video game types (mobile versus console games)</i><p>Mobile vs. console games aren&#x27;t going to be an interesting differentiator. &quot;Video games&quot; are not a monolith, and it&#x27;s safe to hypothesize that any benefit is not from the mere act of staring at a glowing rectangle, but from the activity that the brain is engaged in. For example, you&#x27;d assume that games that let children socialize would help them develop social skills, games that let them be creative would foster creativity, games that force them to think might benefit their reasoning skills, etc. (Of course these could all also be correlations rather than causative.)

I wish there was a study of games in general, with a focus on evaluating games of increasing complexity.<p>Chess has been shown to increase IQ to a point (~2 IQ points). Studies show after about four months of playing chess, student&#x27;s don&#x27;t see further IQ gains. That is, the insights gained begin to trail off as expertise in that game increases.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;327337702_Chess_training_improves_cognition_in_children" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;327337702_Chess_tra...</a><p>I can&#x27;t prove it, but it seems probably true that playing lots of different games of increasing complexity is a path to increasing IQ to whatever an individuals potential ceiling is.

Wish they had looked at type of games. I would imagine something like call of duty and factorio don’t necessarily have same impact on brain

Jolly Heretic et al say that reaction time is better measure of GI than any of those tedious tests.<p>You can feel the pain in Counter-Strike when some kid jumps behind a blind corner and always hits you right between the eyes.

From the linked paper (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41598-022-11341-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41598-022-11341-2</a>):<p>&gt; …measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β = + 0.17), but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming. Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β = + 0.12), contrary to prior research on the effect of watching TV. Although, in a posthoc analysis, this was not significant if parental education (instead of SES) was controlled for.<p>A few interesting points:<p>- This was measured for children 9-10 yo and then two years later (11-12 yo). Children is a very broad category, but they’re not talking about toddlers, but closer to adolescence.<p>- Watching videos has a positive correlation similar to playing video games (but not quite as great), but only when parental education rather than socioeconomic status is controlled for in the data. Does this imply that the more important factor is how educated the parents are? Or do they mean parental education to be involvement of the parent in educating the child?<p>Anecdotally, my much younger nephew (almost 5yo) watches YouTube videos on how to draw Spider-Man and cars. It’s all self directed and stuff that he’s choosing to engage with. as a parent, I definitely see the educational value, and maybe even a glimpse of how unschooling could be effective practice.

I don&#x27;t doubt that spending a significant chunk of your youth will have some effect on brain development. But this effect is surely highly dependent on the type of game played and the resulting social interactions?<p>E.g. I wasted years of my youth playing single-player RTS games. I believe this is the reason for my remarkably quick reflexes (often pointed out by others). But higher IQ? Probably not...

Gaming isn&#x27;t gaming isn&#x27;t gaming.<p>There are games which, I believe, will turn out to be as damaging to the human brain as opium and other addictive substances. Those consist of applying the science of addiction:<p>- If you miss logging in this week, you miss the weekly bonus.<p>- If you want to collect your crops, you need to log in every eight hours<p>- Every four hours, clicking gives a random bonus<p>... and so on. This is a science. I&#x27;m drastically and intentionally oversimplifying, but UPenn has a nice course (&quot;Gamification&quot;) on how to get people addicted.<p>That contrasts with analyzing chess positions, or their modern-day video-game equivalents. If you go on a forum on some types of games, such as RTS, you&#x27;ll sometimes see in-depth analyses with mathematical models, game theory, and similar. Other games will have genuinely hard puzzles.<p>One step up from there, you have things like DragonBox, nandgame, Core War, Green Globs, and sinerider. These deeply integrate learning of complex concepts into the game dynamic.<p>I&#x27;m fundamentally skeptical of the results of any study which lumps FarmVille, StarCraft, and Core War together.

This seems really weak. Households in which kids play more video games than watch TV likely have significant other environmental effects that may swamp the effect of video games.<p>Imagine contrasting a house with the TV on all day vs one where kids have screen time with educational apps in the iPad.

This makes sense to me if I think of games of old like Sim City or games with puzzles in levels but a lot of games today are just mindless micro-transaction delivery systems so I’m skeptical.

I taught a college class this year and asked students to recall their first memory of using a computer. With very few exceptions, their first experience was gaming. It was eye opening for me to see how important gaming is to get people introduced to technology. And in my opinion, more effort should be made to gamify the learning math, reading comprehension, critical thinking, etc.

is like training your brain for a task, but then there is a possibility it generalize to other areas. It depends what childrens do when they are not playing video games, so vs a child staring at tiktok dance moves, they are likely gonna be smarter on certain metrics

I believe this is one of the &quot;correlation doesn&#x27;t mean causation&quot;, or at least I should remind you that IQ is a terrible way to measure intelligence, it just exists because we humans like two things: reducing ambiguity (therefore, measure), and categorize everything.<p>Categorizing people as very intelligent, mensa and so on made me waste a good amount of time. I&#x27;ve been into those circles and it&#x27;s a huge waste of time. And it&#x27;s very imprecise, you could see how some people in those events are average intelligence people with huge patience to grind tests.<p>People want to grade others because they see somebody that is 7 feet and they can measure it with a tape, as I&#x27;ve pointed out, we humans can&#x27;t get rid of the habit of measuring everything, no matter how hard and pointless, or incorrect it is.<p>I have an extremely needy brain for challenging stuff, just like some people are born with huge food desires and end up being obese. Gaming is one of the way to feed what it needs, just like math or any kind of hard problems.<p>I don&#x27;t think playing games increased my intelligence at all. I was born gifted from scratch, everybody could tell it before I played a game for the first time at 5 years old, I was very curious about everything, how things worked and anything mildly sophisticated kept me excited for hours.<p>There are so many activities that activates similar brain areas than gaming which kids do, doing any of them will help you develop your intelligence at the same rate as others.<p>Maybe it did increased my &quot;IQ&quot; as the study suggests, because those IQ tests are very similar in shape and function to games, as you are dealing in games with a good degree of ambiguity and need to rationalize what needs to be done to win. It&#x27;s a skill you can practice.<p>Most people reading this article will conclude the wrong thing, which is that the gaming makes you more intelligent, I don&#x27;t believe it does at all, at best it does make you better in IQ tests.<p>I know this possibly isn&#x27;t out of bad faith from the authors, but even the fact that this is shared in HN makes me believe that somebody was tricked, as &quot;intelligence&quot; is one of the virtues lots of people want to have. Unfortunately, I&#x27;m afraid that 99% of it is decided at birth.

<p><pre><code> They then accessed data for more than 5,000 of those children two years later. Over the intervening period, those in the study who reported spending more time than the norm on video games saw an increase of 2.5 IQ points above the average rise. </code></pre> I hate to be that guy. I know everyone hates this phrase. But I&#x27;m going to say it anyway.<p>Correlation does not imply causation.<p>It&#x27;s possible that higher IQ kids are naturally more drawn towards video games since video games let them solve puzzles and&#x2F;or compete intellectually.<p>That said, I could believe a game such as Starcraft where fast thinking, hand eye coordination, and a healthy dose of game theory can improve cognitive abilities over a long period. After all, nature made it fun to play in order to practice our skillset, and video games are a form of playing. It&#x27;s just that I&#x27;ve never seen a study that can conclusive prove this.

what about the kids who read HN

took em long enough to figure it out