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.