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.
There's a lot to learn and practice to achieve mastery in those games. And experience in other similar video games will strongly correlate to how quick and high the skill in one particular (popular) game will be achieved.
I was watching a video a while back with these two guys playing QuakeIII. They both knew the map intimately, and kept track of when power-ups would respawn based on when they were picked up. Then they based their strategy on what resources they had, and what resources their opponent had and where the other was likely to go next.
So yeah, we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of hours devoted to mastery in this game. Against an opponent like that, two Quake newbies would score about the same (dying almost instantly), even if one of the newbies was otherwise very smart, and the other very dumb.
My god, Did you just bring up some memories. In the 90s my buddy Morgan was head of the game lab at Intel. He was a mast of quake, but another factor was that in the 90s broadband was much more scarce. So imagine playing quake on the fastest machines Intel made on the fastest corp network likely available at the time AND being a master of quake. That was Morgan. And he got paid to do it.
I fucking hated playing quake against him. I was ok, but he was amazing. He also would taunt you.
However, my best gaming memories were when we would basically live at Intel for days at a time playing UO across six diff machines simultaneously on that same corp net. No lag. Thanks for triggering that memory.
Quake (actually Quake III) is still alive today in the form of http://quakelive.com which is free-to-play.
I think the time is ripe for Arena FPS to make a return to the mainstream (with updated graphics). Toxikk which is still Early-access seems very promising in this regard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B28oQvaL7Mg).
I think CS:GO would make for a particularly interesting study. It can probably be studied just by looking at logs. You would have to consider network lag when measuring performance.
I like it because maps like Dust 2 are so well known by competitive players. The success of an individual depends on sophisticated social factors around cooperation or divergence from team members. Strong teams nearly always outperform teams with strong individuals but poor cohesion in my experience.
Intelligence could be measured across a variety of types/dimensions including motor skills/reaction time, individual tactical performance and team cohesion.
Is anybody doing work like this? Is the data available from Valve or independent server admins?
There's a lot to learn and practice to achieve mastery in those games. And experience in other similar video games will strongly correlate to how quick and high the skill in one particular (popular) game will be achieved.
I was watching a video a while back with these two guys playing QuakeIII. They both knew the map intimately, and kept track of when power-ups would respawn based on when they were picked up. Then they based their strategy on what resources they had, and what resources their opponent had and where the other was likely to go next.
So yeah, we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of hours devoted to mastery in this game. Against an opponent like that, two Quake newbies would score about the same (dying almost instantly), even if one of the newbies was otherwise very smart, and the other very dumb.