Playing video games boosts IQ in children | Hacker News Reader

Playing video games boosts IQ in children

sciencealert.com

59 pointsloandbehold52 comments

The HN title ("Playing video games boosts IQ in children") is editorialized and is directly contradicted by the article:

> While the difference in cognitive abilities was a small one and isn't enough to show a causal relationship, it is enough to be notable

The original title wasn't much better ("Playing Video Games Has an Unexpected Effect on Kids' IQ, Says Study"), but it was somewhat better and should have been used instead. As submitted it sounds like someone did a controlled trial and established causality.

I'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't actually backed yet by the science can backfire in the long run, so it's important to state the claims accurately.

I think the original title is clickbait and the editorialization here is superior - I agree it would be better with a "slightly" or "may" or "is associated with", but that feels like picking nits.

Distinguishing between correlation and causation is not picking nits, it's one of the most important parts of science communication and is the one that is most frequently screwed up—often with terrible outcomes for public health.

The original title was clickbaity, but it stopped short of identifying a specific casual effect—it merely implied that there was one, which implication is corrected when you go read the body of the article. This title conveys a complete thought about the research that is inaccurate.

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's what was on), this is infinitely better. How can I be mad when he's throwing around words like "non-euclidean"? He's learning WAY more from Minecraft than school at this point. As a bonus, we're practically neighbors with Mojang, and visited them on a sick day once.

Love this. I have a young one I am thinking of letting get involved in the Minecraft scene (I think far less exploitative than Roblox?). How does one get started? What console are you using? Or PC? How do I enable mods? And who is Mojang?

Generally, minecraft creation is less exploitative than roblox, since mojang (the creators of the game) has no hand in your creations. Generally, a young one's creations will be "maps"/"worlds" (places where you can run around and play etc) and "skins" (how your character looks). AFAIK, minecraft mod creation is a lot more involved than it is for roblox, but I only have a very cursory knowledge of roblox.

Using mods will depend if they are playing the legacy pc version ("Java Edition"), which has much more mod support or the newer cross-platform version ("Bedrock Edition"), where mods are generally limited to things that are approved by mojang (I have a lot less experience with bedrock so don't quote me on that). Generally, you will find mods are either "forge" or "fabric", which are the main two types of framework that you can make them with. I think fabric is the more "modern" version, but both are constantly being updated for the latest version. They have their own modloaders, but you can use programs that manage your mods for you, such as the modrinth launcher or the curseforge launcher. Once you have one of those installed, you generally just drop the mods into the mods folder and assuming you have all the frameworks and versions correct, they should just work. You'll probably want to google for more detailed tutorials on adding mods if it's your first time, as a HN comment is going to be too short to contain them haha.

Generally, making full mods is going to involve java programming, so a decent grasp of java will help a lot there, and there are lots of tutorials for it online as well.

Agreed on Roblox. BUT it has Roblox Studio, which seems like a Unity-light. I taught my son to add different shapes, move them around, scale and rotate etc, so he could build his own obstacle courses. I think if you go down the Roblox route, make sure to focus on creation.

Just be careful that you are aware of roblox being a bit... eh about protecting its creators. This video (https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ) and its successor are about as much as I am aware of the situation, so it might have changed since they were put out

There are two versions of Minecraft: Java Edition and Bedrock Edition. Java Edition is only on PCs/Mac, while Bedrock is on phones, tablets and consoles. Java Edition is the original and I think more customizable in general, a bit more hard core. We just have both.

We use a special launcher for Java Edition called "Prism Launcher" which lets you handle different versions of the game, installing mods etc. It's really taught him important concepts like "if you install 134 mods, incompatibilities will break the game", and general debugging, like, install one mod at a time and revert it something doesn't work. I prefer PCs in general because it's more likely to lead to an understanding for computers.

Mojang is the company behind Minecraft.

I'd start with the base game! Give you kid a chance to familiarize themselves with the core mechanics, particularly redstone, then look into command blocks and resource packs. These are fully vanilla mechanics, no need to fiddle with installing mods (which differs based on platform/version), but are extremely powerful!

Yes, first of all just try the game and see if it sticks. Once there is obsessive interest, you can try to guide it towards mentally stimulating ends. I don't know if I'd recommend YouTube for english native speakers, but for kids like my son, learning English from YouTube is a plus. There are lots of shitty YouTubers just goofing around, but there are some good ones like Pixlriffs (Minecraft Survival Guide), Shalz and Mumbo Jumbo that focus on building things and exploring all aspects of the game and different mods. As an example, my son learned about crop rotation from Pixlriffs, because apparently its a mechanic in the game. Can't be mad at that!

I grew up on Final Fantasy which required reading so it helped with my reading.

I think it's really underestimated how much "frivolous" obsessions lead to rapid learning. I think you can take any obsession and guide it down a productive path. Played a lot of Counter Strike back in the day, and went to school with two brothers who built a betting site for CS esports games (not real money) and it blew up. I think they're rich now. Final Fantasy may seem like it doesn't teach you much, but it taught you reading, probably inspired many people to learn about Japan and the Japanese language, build websites about it etc.

> the study only looked at children in the US and did not differentiate between video game types (mobile versus console games)

Mobile vs. console games aren't going to be an interesting differentiator. "Video games" are not a monolith, and it'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'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.)

> For example, you'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.)

Then you have to consider, does the game benefit more than the IRL activities it replaces and are there better replacements? For instance, I'm highly skeptical that any game that "let[s] children socialize" would be superior at "develop[ing] social skills" than IRL socialization. Also, I could totally beleive video games boosts IQ more than passive TV watching, but less than IRL physical play, socialization, and reading.

There are certain properties of video games that have been shown to have interesting cognitive effects, that tend to be more or less represented across the mobile/console divide, for example, 3D platformers [1].

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I wish there was a study of games in general, with a focus on evaluating games of increasing complexity.

Chess has been shown to increase IQ to a point (~2 IQ points). Studies show after about four months of playing chess, student's don't see further IQ gains. That is, the insights gained begin to trail off as expertise in that game increases.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327337702_Chess_tra...

I can'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

Why do you think that?

Because they’re… completely and utterly different in every way except for both involving photons?

Oh that makes sense. I assumed the comment was lumping those two games together and implying they wouldn't have a positive impact. My mistake.

But they may! In both games you have to conceptualize the world around you. Both games are abstractions over real life problems. In both you need to create your own mental abstractions and think about the world around you in a simplified form and react. Obviously one is "fast thinking" and one is "slow thinking" but both skills are important. Even in games like CoD you do some slow thinking to devise a strategy for certain events you'll encounter. Then you need to quickly recognize those events and react in the way you planned on.

A common thing in CoD is that two enemies might pop out, how do you deal with it? Maybe try to focus on the closer one first, or the one that seems more likely to have seen you. You need to think about how you'll handle situations in advance. It sounds simple but left to my own devices I tend to shoot in between the two of them (and then get killed). And there's 100 other situations like that. You encounter them, die, and think about how you could have handled it better.

I'd say CoD type games improve spatial awareness and hand eye coordination.

While factorio improves what we commonly think of when we say IQ.

CoD also requires strategy, planning (specifically configuring weapons and equipment based on mission parameters, as well as coordination abilities.)

It’s a lot more than simply running and shooting.

Call of duty is incredibly rich and complex. The various strategies, loadouts, various characteristics of the weapon configurations, the different maps. It’s a very complicated game that requires considerable reasoning and spatial awarensss skills. To be really good at it requires a depth of thinking. Just comparing the elevator pitch for CoD vs Factorio doesn’t really do it justice.

And don't forget the rich vocabulary you pick up over voice chat. ;)

Jolly Heretic et al say that reaction time is better measure of GI than any of those tedious tests.

You can feel the pain in Counter-Strike when some kid jumps behind a blind corner and always hits you right between the eyes.

Isn’t he a discredited pseudo-academic?

It's not "a better measure." It's correlated to G in some respect, but the correlation is vague, and it's very far from determinative... Otherwise you'd expect table tennis professionals and ace baseball sluggers to be geniuses.

You too have access to peeker's advantage, though. If you peek, you have the time advantage on the person being peeked upon. Now go, and dominate the CS lobbies.

Sorry. It takes too much time analyze what I just saw and then the advantage is already gone.

From the linked paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11341-2):

> …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.

A few interesting points:

- 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.

- 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?

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'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?

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...

I have also been told to have excellent reflexes. The first time I touched computers was when I dropped out of my masters degree. I was basically a bookworm my entire childhood/student life. Sometimes, it is just nature (not saying nurture couldn't play part in it).

Gaming isn't gaming isn't gaming.

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:

- If you miss logging in this week, you miss the weekly bonus.

- If you want to collect your crops, you need to log in every eight hours

- Every four hours, clicking gives a random bonus

... and so on. This is a science. I'm drastically and intentionally oversimplifying, but UPenn has a nice course ("Gamification") on how to get people addicted.

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'll sometimes see in-depth analyses with mathematical models, game theory, and similar. Other games will have genuinely hard puzzles.

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.

I'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.

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.

Just teach your kids that they can't afford free games.

Tell them to maintain a wish list on Steam and GoG and let you know when there are sales for the real games. Teaches them patience too.

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 "correlation doesn't mean causation", 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.

Categorizing people as very intelligent, mensa and so on made me waste a good amount of time. I've been into those circles and it's a huge waste of time. And it's very imprecise, you could see how some people in those events are average intelligence people with huge patience to grind tests.

People want to grade others because they see somebody that is 7 feet and they can measure it with a tape, as I've pointed out, we humans can't get rid of the habit of measuring everything, no matter how hard and pointless, or incorrect it is.

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.

I don'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.

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.

Maybe it did increased my "IQ" 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's a skill you can practice.

Most people reading this article will conclude the wrong thing, which is that the gaming makes you more intelligent, I don't believe it does at all, at best it does make you better in IQ tests.

I know this possibly isn'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 "intelligence" is one of the virtues lots of people want to have. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that 99% of it is decided at birth.

  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.

I hate to be that guy. I know everyone hates this phrase. But I'm going to say it anyway.

Correlation does not imply causation.

It's possible that higher IQ kids are naturally more drawn towards video games since video games let them solve puzzles and/or compete intellectually.

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's just that I've never seen a study that can conclusive prove this.

Games like LoL or MMORPGs can require you to learn how to improve because without it you will be stuck at some elo/levels

LoL just taught me how to lose friends and alienate people by screaming at them. I just stay away from competitive games, my blood boils when my friend doesn't heal or whatever. I realized it was very unhealthy for me to play. I only play coop or single player games now.

If you managed to overcome rage and those bad habits then it would be very useful lesson from the game

What puzzle or intelectual competition does a game like Fortnite provide? I mean, there are lots of things, like coordination, reflex, but I don't see much intelectuality. Maybe learning where to be?

Figuring out patterns and behaviors, developing a strategy that works on them.

My competitive FPS experience is from Quake/Quake 2/Early CS era, but from what little gameplay I've seen the modern ones don't seem that different.

You're competing against other agents, with some combination of planning, coordination, and motor skills. That drives learning.

The video game modality is incidental to the learning process.

Most newer games are just weird forms of social media (Roblox), so I kind of doubt it improves intelligence…

It's hard to prove causation in any human kid development though, because - for good reasons - we are not allowed to experiment on kids, and have the studies sufficiently long-running.

That's why it's surprisingly hard to find a real scientific guides what is actually good for kid development... all we have are some weak correlations.

Which doesn't mean we should overstate those weak correlations as casual.

Parents do read things like this and it creates an enormous amount of stress to see the "science" pull in so many different directions. The only real ways out are to just follow the research that backs your own preconceptions or give up on following the science at all and just reason from first principles and adapt dynamically to your child. The former is where most people end up—cherry picking the studies that "prove" they're already right—and the stronger we state the results the worse that effect becomes.

what about the kids who read HN

took em long enough to figure it out

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