Why video games are the new IQ tests

Every click and button push in a networked game generates a piece of data to explore human play behaviour at an unprecedented scale

Gamers won’t be surprised. We and our colleagues have discovered a link between people’s ability to play video games and their general intelligence. Our research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, can’t establish whether playing video games makes people smarter or whether being smart makes you better at video games (or some other explanation). But it points to intriguing possibilities in using games more generally for behavioural science, in particular for measuring people’s intelligence.

To demonstrate this, our team (led by Professor Alex Wade) ran two studies. The first involved 56 experienced players of League