[dash2]

The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche.

Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory journal, a very low bar. They publish tens of thousands of articles every year, while charging vast fees.

In general, these guys have correlations, not causation. Children's IQ - and gaming habits etc. - develop as they age, so controlling for baseline IQ is not enough to make a correlation with later IQ and gaming causal. It seems much more likely that smarter kids game more, e.g. because they live in richer households. (No, controlling for SES isn't enough to rule this out, for much the same reasons of measurement error as for the genetics.)

If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.

[pocketsand]

If the noise in polygenic scores is random, all that will do is reduce correlations. Random measurement error always reduces the ability to observe relationships. To be clear, I do not know enough about polygenic scores to judge one way or another how the noise "works" vis-a-vis the entire analysis.

The Porsche comment is snide, but actually exposes a similar error in your critique. Sure, a tax return-derived measure of income would be superior to measuring if someone owned a luxury car. But, if you found yourself in a situation where all you had to go on for measuring economic wellbeing was (luxury) car ownership, your analysis is likely to improve by including it rather than excluding it, unless the measure itself had serious other issues with its accuracy.

Likewise, for SES, it is an imperfect measure, but it is the best we have for measuring social position in a concise way.

Having worked in research and universities for a while, the type of critique presented in this post is one you often see of new graduate students. They are able to tear down problems with research very well, but tend to overlook whether the study itself was still informative, or whether the opposite finding is likely to be true.

For example, suppose we wanted to know if video games or watching videos on the internet are making you dumber. A study like this may not convince you it's making you smarter, but it presents decent evidence they're not making you dumber. You can point out how the measures aren't perfect, but that is far from saying the opposite is true or the observed trends are completely spurious.

[gwern]

> If the noise in polygenic scores is random, all that will do is reduce correlations. Random measurement error always reduces the ability to observe relationships. To be clear, I do not know enough about polygenic scores to judge one way or another how the noise "works" vis-a-vis the entire analysis.

That's correct, it is a flaw of the entire analysis, not the PGS in isolation. Yes, the polygenic score, when used to define 'genetic intelligence', will be biased towards zero and will miss a lot of the genetic intelligence. What then happens is the video-game playing becomes a measure of intelligence (genetic or otherwise), capturing what the polygenic score (and other covariates) miss. The logic then works in reverse: the reduced correlation is precisely why the residual confounding works. The worse your 'measurements' are at measuring the underlying trait, the more wiggle room there is for your 'outcomes' to actually be correcting the 'measurements' and not vice versa. See "Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... , Westfall & Yarkoni 2016. (More examples: https://www.gwern.net/notes/Regression )

What OP shows is not that video game playing causes IQ, but IQ causes video game playing. The choice to play video games (or not play them, because you are bad at learning) is an additional 1-item long IQ test and helps corrects for the error.

(And we do in fact know that video gaming & IQ correlate, so nothing new there. We also know from all the brain training randomized experiments that the causal arrow doesn't run in the direction they want it to run. OP is very wrong, including in claiming that the Flynn effect justifies believing in their effect - it actually is a criticism of their claimed causal relationship between IQs have been steady or falling even as video gaming increased massively.)

[dash2]

The point is not whether including polygenic scores is better than nothing. The point is whether it's good enough to justify the claims they are making. It's not. The same holds for SES.

I disagree that this study presents decent evidence of anything. I don't claim that the conclusions are false. But they haven't backed them up. There are lots of ways that the observed trends can be spurious. I mentioned some. The study is very weakly informative.

[DANK_YACHT]

> The point is not whether including polygenic scores is better than nothing. The point is whether it's good enough to justify the claims they are making. It's not.

What is the justification for this assertion? If polygenic scores are simply "noisy," then, as the GP mentioned, they may be good enough when used in aggregate. There can be a lot of signal in noisy data. Ask any ML practitioner.

[dash2]

Polygenic scores are themselves an aggregation. And they contain a ton of noise. From twin studies, R2 of the "true" polygenic score on education is about 40%. The R2 of our best actual polygenic score is 4%. IIRC these guys aren't even using the education polygenic score. They're using the PGS for IQ. That's even noisier (because it was created using smaller samples, and you need biiig samples for this to work).

[DANK_YACHT]

> Polygenic scores are themselves an aggregation. And they contain a ton of noise.

Again, noisy data can still be useful. For instance, generate a perfect single-variable normal distribution, sample along the x-axis and perturb each point randomly in the y direction either up or down. Depending on the range of random values used to move the sampled points, you can still see the underlying distribution even though the data is noisy.

Two possible arguments you might make:

1) The data is noisy and the paper's authors haven't collected enough data to account for the amount of noise. Usually people will do something like null-hypothesis significance testing to measure this.

2) The noise isn't uniformly random and has some underlying bias that is affecting the results.

[dash2]

Noisy data can be useful. What it can't do is be useful enough to say "we have controlled for X". There will be a large unmeasured component of genetic variation - probably about 90% of it - that controlling for the PGS doesn't capture. Given that, throwing a PGS into the regression is not worth the candle.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> If the noise in polygenic scores is random, all that will do is reduce correlations. Random measurement error always reduces the ability to observe relationships.

I think you’re misunderstanding how they’re being used (or I am). I think they’re trying to control for genetics via polygenic scores, not trying to establish a relationship between those scores and intelligence. The analogy is that you’re measuring the effect of the price of kids’ socks on their intelligence, and saying the observed effect isn’t due to parental income in some other way, because you’ve controlled for parental income(by controlling for whether there’s a porche in the driveway).

[rapind]

> If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.

Video games, like all things, should not all be treated equal. I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investment and problem solving. The difference in games can be as varied as comparing a marketing pamphlet to Asimov's novels.

I don't dispute your take on the quality of the research though. I would even go further and speculate it would be really really hard to come up with meaningful tests due to game variance. So most anything on the subject is likely fluff.

[BeetleB]

Reminds me of when I played SimCity 2000 as a teenager. In my first attempt I ran out of money and got kicked out.

So I decided to start again. I noted down the cost of all the necessary items: Residential, city, industrial zones, cost of building roads, power plant, and utility lines, and of course water. I put the game on pause, took out a notebook, and started calculating a somewhat optimal city with the initial budget I was provided.

I built the city very quickly, and this time round I didn't run out of money, and took the game all the way to archologies. I did skimp on fire stations and a disaster destroyed most of the city, but it still survived overall.

I don't think I could have succeeded without that level of planning.

[DANK_YACHT]

Any real-time PvP game has the ultimate puzzle: another human being. Once you're mechanically familiar with a PvP game, the game disappears, in a sense, and you're left trying to figure out the (very human) weaknesses of your opponent. It's quite a beautiful experience, and not one unique to video games. You see similar phenomena in sports and many other forms of competition as well.

[bnralt]

In my experience, the vast majority of game play time, even with most complex games, is spent on relatively mindless repetitive behavior. This gets worse the more time is spent with a specific game. As a player improves, they start to know what they're supposed to do in more and more situations (compare the way a novice agonizes over an opening pawn move in chess with the way advanced players often speed through the opening moves). Games might be complex, but you might only be dealing with that complexity ~10% of the time (or less as you improve).

[hypertele-Xii]

> As a player improves, they start to know what they're supposed to do in more and more situations (compare the way a novice agonizes over an opening pawn move in chess with the way advanced players often speed through the opening moves).

Chess is a particularly bad example because you can memorize openings.

In Fischer random chess, the starting positions of the pieces are randomized, so even advanced players will agonize over the opening move.

[bmacho]

In chess advanced players start to agonize at move 7. Chess has all the benefits of Fisher random chess, but has an additional layer, and requires three additional skills: learn, analyze, and memorize.

(I myself I am a bughouse chess person, it's a very different beast on the same board. It's full of adrenaline, hope, fear, anger, grief, in 2 minute long runs.)

[rapind]

Some competitive (PvP) games are basically imperfect chess. Just like you'd learn chess, and eventually move on to studying matches, you would do the same with some (PvP) video games, like DotA etc.

On the other hand you could literally have a game to see how long you can keep pushing a big read button (dopamine inducing effects and sounds included of course!).

The variance is huge. We couldn't make a blanket general statement about brain development from tabletop games that include say Snap / War, Checkers, and Chess. And that's not even a sliver of the variance video games gave.

P.S. I'm by no means a gaming advocate. IMO video games are becoming (have become) Vegas 2.0 and I could list a huge number of potential negatives.

[Jach]

How can you recognize the huge variance of games in one breath but then suggest in another they're in any real sense becoming (parenthetically already became) the equivalent of casino games? In what sense, exactly, because it can't be variety? Sure there are negative points to both video games and casino games, but there are negative points to everything. The ones that are arguably 'shared' aren't unique to that pair either. Have you actually analyzed the things they call electronic 'games' in casinos? They're not varied at all; whether you're in Vegas or some random Indian casino, about the most variety you'll get is one row of slots has wolf clipart and another row has zoo animal clipart. Sure I guess you might find some non-slots that wrap one of the physical games like the card games, and to be fair I once saw some giant flappy bird thing on my way to a casino buffet years ago. Still, overall game design? What game design? Any random gacha has better game design. As a genre of game in the way slots are a genre of game, there's already been a lot of evolution and variety in 'gameplay' while retaining the core PNG collection premise. You'll find more slots innovation in mini-games inside larger video games than in slots themselves. The random gacha probably has better art too.

> could literally have a game to see how long you can keep pushing a big read button

Could? Did. Even Progress Quest counts for this sort of thing, and it was a parody in 2002. There's also the classic game of Simon Says which is basically keep pushing shiny buttons but less entertaining long term, since "number goes up" only goes as high as your human memory instead of a computer's. The biggest modern twist that some will find a negative is something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14UerIOvZKM (literal red button) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kkGu7yIi98 where the time "wasting" is magnified beyond just the gamer but also to an audience.

[bnralt]

> Just like you'd learn chess, and eventually move on to studying matches, you would do the same with some (PvP) video games, like DotA etc.

Sure, but as far as I know there isn't much value (beyond personal interest) in studying high level chess (and from what I've seen, it's detrimental when people start obsessing over it). You're putting effort into getting better at playing a game.

[the_only_law]

> I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investment and problem solving.

I’m a big grand strategy fan, mostly Paradox games rn, and I almost feel like these are worse for me because the depth keeps me engaged longer (and honesty waste a lot of time) compared even to something like a shitty copy/paste mobile game employing dark patterns because those get so boring so quick. Whereas if I start and eu4 or ck3 campaign and actually play it, it’s almost certain my brain will be shot to hell to for a few days.

[boringg]

Ahh I agree with this. I think there is a benefit at the beginning in the learning process of the game but then it has seriously diminishing returns. I would put factorio in this category where once you get the model and have learned most of the curve you are then at diminishing returns or negative returns because of the painful way in that devs construct these games to keep you on for longer periods of times. I'm not sure the highest levels of complexity and long dedication to the game really do provide greater learning for people.

[boringg]

I'll add to this I wish there was a game that didn't follow the traditionally.. now you've leveled up spend X time at this level/technology/etc before you go to the next one. Why not create a game that you can grow as fast as you can learn instead of putting in time barriers. Probably incentives for developers/game companies ruin that model but would be nice for a change.

[nluken]

I love Paradox games, but I can't play them because as soon as I start up a campaign I know it will become a huge time sink for a few days. I think their games definitely require/develop problem solving skills, especially in areas where you need to make changes to create indirect effects. With that said, they may not be the best way of going about it.

[paulluuk]

I think that even if we found that children who play difficult games tend to be more intelligent, that still makes it hard to separate correlation from causation. Do children become smarter because they play difficult games? Or do smart children enjoy playing difficult games? Or both?

[bee_rider]

Hades, played competently, is a nice little optimization problem with lots of arbitrary constraints thrown at you to keep it fresh. Well, it is mostly reflexes, but the optimization problem is also a significant part of it.

Grand strategy and 4x games always feel like too much depth, to me. I know I could do better if I pause and manually place every worker/micro everything. But that's overwhelming. I could try to be clever and only optimize where necessary, but the game is paused, there's no tradeoff for analyzing everything other than my time. Just give me the meaningful choices, game!

[jklinger410]

I've played thousands of hours in EU4 and am still very bad at it. Same with Cities Skylines.

But I could go on and on about the very real ways I apply those losses to my work life. I do think they have a huge benefit.

[Wowfunhappy]

I wouldn't underestimate how much time people can sink into dumb gotcha games. Maybe not you, but others.

IMO, the biggest problem with modern video games is how many of them are designed to keep you playing virtually forever. I think a game like Zelda (maybe not BoTW, but definitely OoT) is great for children, because it teaches problem solving and rational thinking, and it has a natural time limit! You might play it incessantly for a few days, but eventually you'll reach the end and need to seek out a new experience.

[mc32]

Some years ago it was farmville that wasted people's time.

[albrewer]

> gotcha games

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game

[Jach]

You're not wrong in terms of how much time people can spend on something that doesn't take much thought (it can be a comfort, even), but your diagnosis of the problem is way off. There's nothing about modern video games that can receive the blame for this, even if I hate what gacha and friends have done to the place on the design perspective. (Fortunately there's still plenty of market that's not design I dislike. Another commenter mentioned games as Vegas 2.0, but I don't think that commenter is a gamer either. Casinos are absolutely dominated by the shittiest of games, from a pure game design perspective, with seemingly no room for anything else. The overall gaming market though? It's quite healthy and varied. And even the cancer in mobile gaming is but a harmless mole compared to the tumor of casino electronic 'games'. And to be clear, people can spend/waste their time and money as they choose, that's never been my complaint against any of it, I'd sooner complain about people complaining about others wasting time on X.)

I'm surprised, you seem to have spent enough time around kids (and were a kid once yourself), yet you think "replay value" (which is inflated for some games by not having a definitive end) is at all a modern thing, or even necessarily a bad thing. This extends beyond games. Do you realize how many hours of Frozen have been watched, over, and over, and over? Or how many hours listening to Baby Shark? Or whatever's going around now? Or whatever was going around when you were a kid? (Insert favorite classic Disney movie? Tetris? Cribbage? Chutes and Ladders? Minecraft?) Kids love repetition -- humans in general like repetition a lot. Heard of the Hero's Journey?

Don't underestimate OoT either! If a kid liked OoT enough to reach the end, it's unlikely that they'll just move on immediately unless they're literally forced onto the next shrink-wrapped "brand new" experience by someone. (To be sure, if I'm ever a parent myself, I will consciously do a bit of that pushing to try avoiding letting them repeat the same thing like some popular movie too much, but I'd be a hypocrite and a fool to think I can or should prevent all of it. Besides, it's remarkable how many times you can watch/be all but forced to watch something even as a young teen (cough Napoleon Dynamite) and yet retain almost no memory of the thing's details as an adult.)

OoT is a real-time interactive simulation, such things are naturally just fun to immerse in, even after you've beaten Ganon / "reached the end". But besides just continuing to 'hang out' aimlessly in the game, there's all the stuff they could aim at in order to "100%" the game, or just go back through optional/missed stuff in general/at leisure. (But everyone who plays OoT needs to get the Biggoron's Sword!) So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code. Again, don't underestimate games like OoT, Super Mario 64, Dark Souls, Megaman X, or Chess, either; having an "end" doesn't protect them from being the object of people's time spending/wasting.

[Wowfunhappy]

I'm actually training to teach elementary school, so yes you could say I've spent some time around children!

I would absolutely expect a child to play OoT well past beating Ganon for the first time, but there is still a limit to how much you can do. Compare that to something like Destiny, which is basically designed to be a bottomless pit you could grind forever!

> So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code.

But all of that stuff is great, because now they're creating their own experiences for themselves, getting creative, perhaps even socializing. It's basically the virtual equivalent of traditional unstructured play, which we know has all sorts of educational benefits.

I don't know why children like to e.g. watch Frozen a million times, but I imagine it's because they actually discover something new with each watch. As long as they're driven by intrinsic motivation, I think that's relatively healthy, at least compared to an XP bar that gets higher with each Frozen rewatch!

[Jach]

I think it's more about comfort in familiarity than discovering something new (Frozen isn't that deep), but whatever the case, as external media there's always some intrinsic "I want this for reasons I think are my own" motivation combined with extrinsic "I want this because for good or ill, by various carrots and sticks, others made it intending that I should want it" motivation. Would it be so bad if Frozen had a built-in times-watched counter or an XP bar? Nonsensical for the latter and tasteless, but grant that it could bring people in for rewatches more than it pushed them away, it still surely wouldn't rob people of all their will, ultimately they'd still rewatch for some other intrinsic reasons along with the extrinsic XP bar and other extrinsic things like the intentionally designed attractive (for many) art aesthetic. How much of each motivation will vary; I think people are probably biased to imagine the extrinsics are usually 'nice bonuses on top'.

Destiny doesn't really help your case, I think. The most objectionable thing they do (as I hear it, I skipped it), at least relative to things like it (Warframe), is exploit fear-of-missing-out psychology; they remove previously released content. (Like adding an ad to a site to exploit/monetize viewers, this is not a neutral design choice, and has driven people away from the game entirely rather than what seems to be the default assumed effect of any psychology exploit (except 'make things beautiful'?) of sucking out their will and owning them.) But over time they've not just cut stuff, but added new content. So there are eventually fresh(er) experiences even if you hit max level/acquired everything/etc. like an MMO. Until they dry out anyway, and the problem solves itself, because ultimately an infinitely increasing XP bar just isn't enough to keep most people interested.

They did make an actual title cut to the sequel for Destiny 2 and that's where further new content went -- has it since had enough content added that another timeline could have legitimately packaged it as Destiny 3?

Besides all that, it's legitimately a game, quite more than a glorified slot, it's a full simulation, and has a satisfying core gameplay loop -- the same one refined through the earlier Halo games.

Similarly, though not as core, it's also just satisfying to have Link roll around everywhere. Adding lootboxes to OoT would be beyond tasteless and obscene, but the product would still be quite a bit better than an actual glorified slot, because there's enough game design there alongside, there's something beyond just plain 'give money maybe win prize'. Japanese crane games / ufo catchers are more in line with glorified slots than a game with typical distasteful 'games-as-service' monetization strategies.

That ties in with your earlier deleted edit I still thought worth addressing. I see the concern on glorified slots, but I don't think it's really worth worrying about. In video games, even some hypothetical one with master manipulator levels of thought to make it indefinitely addicting, it's ultimately not chemical injection in basis to form a true dependency on the average human, and so the next thing comes out sooner or later and voila, newness, change. Is the 'Destiny is a dead game' meme close to the truth? It certainly seems a lot less popular than several battle royales, and those too will decline.

Casinos are in comparison much more niche, have little competition and innovation (look at their dull slots with no redeeming game design to them at all), have physical chemical associations (booze and smokes minimum) driving a bunch of it (their psychological playbook is laughably weak in comparison to something like Genshin Impact), and of course must be enabled by real money. The last factor is the simplest barrier to keep kids from getting addicted to casino-style crap, free-to-play dominates. Now maybe it's sad if trends like lootboxes or gachas or battle passes continue (or perhaps in your mind also trends of games designed with elements to never end), but it's far from concerning, especially when games lacking such crap continue to be successful...

[the_only_law]

> but I don't think that commenter is a gamer either. Casinos are absolutely dominated by the shittiest of games, from a pure game design perspective, with seemingly no room for anything else.

Definitely not the wider market, but I wouldn’t think it unfair to describe the mobile gaming market like this. There have recently been a number of AAA PC games ported to mobile which makes me actually realize the power of the hardware in my hand, and also wonder why every other mobile game I see is a rip off puzzle game concept that’s been done a million times over.

[spookybones]

I feel fortunate enough to have grown up playing point and click games, like Myst, 7th Guest, and Fate of Atlantis, and keeping a notebook on my desk for clues to puzzles. I think it had a positive effect on my development, comparable to playing chess, which I also did.

[asdff]

If you are going to critique the methodology please provide a reference where this is not a robust method. You may be right but how can I tell without some references? The scholar.google search for "controlling for genetics using polygenetic scores" brings up many recent papers about this methodology and the arguments made in these seem stronger to me than this one comment. IMO on the internet when people can easily misinterpret the science, its important to be clear as possible especially when we take things down.

As far as scientific reports goes its a fine journal, its run by nature. It's not on the same planet as the predatory journals that spam inboxes. I worry that people will read your comment, assume you speak from authority, and discount any work they might see coming from that journal when we both know that good science can be found in scientific reports, and that impact factor is more strongly correlated with "sexy" or expensive science than good science anyhow.

[dash2]

I don't speak from authority, but I do speak from experience as an academic. Scientific Reports is run by Springer, who are more competent than Elsevier but just as predatory. Their acceptance rate is 48%, and in 2021, they published 23000 articles. (You can check this here: https://www.nature.com/srep/research-articles?year=2021.) At a publication fee of almost $2000 (Wikipedia), this is a money-making machine, as skewered by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9gzQz1Pms. I think it's obvious what the incentives are here.

The reason the method is not robust is that the typical polygenic score explains only 10% or less of the variance of its target phenotype. That leaves 90% of the variance unaccounted for by the control, which means your error term will be correlated with your focal dependent variable, violating the requirements for regression to give an unbiased estimate. I don't think these claims are controversial. We know polygenic scores are noisy. We know what happens when your control variables are noisy.

The fact that lots of people do it doesn't, sadly, make it work. Lots of social psychologists run trials with an N of 35 (though they're addressing this critique, to their credit). Lots of historians fail to specify their hypotheses and to search for disconfirming data. Economists spent the 80s and 90s running cross-country regressions, before realizing that they had, in aggregate, more independent variables than cases. And so on.

[throwingrocks]

Your response seemed reasonable, and I was nodding along until the last paragraph. I get the impression you had your mind made up about video games and intelligence long before this study was published.

[lettergram]

I think the point the prior commenter was making was that this research validates people who think gaming is good. They pointed out the issues and said “if you still want to believe this, I can’t stop you”

The commenter may have a bias, but most prior research shows us the opposite of the study.

I also saw the poor experimental design and had a similar thoughts. Basically, this research looks poorly done and like an effort to prop up the gaming industry (and / or validate the authors pre-suppositions).

[d3ckard]

In any case, using CoD as an example does not exactly show good will.

I personally believe in huge gains from gaming, based on personal experience (so obviously n = 1, read further accordingly).

Platformers train hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, strategies teach resource management, RPGs about optimization and adopting growth mindset, racing games require long-time concentration, puzzlers and adventure games test your logic.

In general, games require you to: - learn a set of tools - master them - conquer objective

while also prevailing in face of adversity.

I never regretted the hours I spent gaming and I feel they contributed very much to my softeng career (not directly though).

[nosianu]

If you seriously play the game you get good at... the game.

Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).

Given that, claiming that things even further removed than those other games, which closely resemble one another, requires quite a bit of proof. It does not look like the skills transfer well even between similar games.

> while also prevailing in face of adversity.

I don't think we agree on what "adversity" is. You are just playing a game, and your brain knows it. If someone has the same brain reaction to the game avatar being in virtual "danger" to his actual body being in mortal danger than I'd like to see that, and I think most people would think that is not normal or healthy.

You don't need to defend yourself, if you had fun playing than that's more than enough. I don't understand why you want to drive yourself to seeing more in it than that.

[AlexandrB]

> Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).

That might be true if you're comparing the top 0.1%, but someone who played a lot of Starcraft would be miles ahead of any newcomer in both Starcraft II and Warcraft III.

Your example is like saying that a world-class sprinter would struggle to be a world-class cyclist. Yes, that's true, but the aspects that do carry over - cardio and muscle development - would immediately put them in the top 5% of the field even if they never win the Tour de France.

[svnt]

Maybe a world-class sprinter would be in the top 5% of the entire population who has ever cycled (not “the field”). Sprinting and cycling are so different you may as well be comparing snooker and darts and saying that wrist control is the determining factor.

[bnralt]

> Even within the same game genre that barely translates. People good at Starcraft I struggled with Starcraft II, people great at Warcraft made little headway in Starcraft II (e.g. WCIII players like Grubby or Happy).

Even being good at Starcraft I in 1998 wouldn't make you good at Starcraft I in 2003. People uncover certain optimizations and strategies over times that are quickly adopted by everyone, to the extent that playing the same a good player in 1998 would get you dubbed a "noob" in 2003.

[confidantlake]

It didn't translate 100%, but even a pro player in Starcraft1 unsuccessfully transitioning to Starcraft2 still played at an insanely high level relative to the general population. It was the difference from maybe being a top 50 player before to a top 500 player after. I would say that this is evidence of a very high carryover.

WC3 => Sc2 is a much greater leap than sc1 -> sc2 but still there was decent carryover. Grubby was still a GM or high masters player, even if he was no longer elite.

[michaelt]

> Platformers train hand-eye coordination and pattern recognition, strategies teach resource management, RPGs about optimization and adopting growth mindset...

Sure - and joining the high school football team teaches teamwork, self-discipline, dealing with adversity, appearing before crowds, nutrition, fitness, etc etc

So what?

[wing-_-nuts]

Video games are available to people of all abilities. You certainly can't say the same of football (indeed, with concussions, one might question if this lowers intelligence over the long term)

[AlexandrB]

I'm actually really curious what effect playing fast, twitchy games will have on things like reaction time as one ages. Would be interesting to see long-term studies on the subject.

[rowanG077]

I don't understand your reply. This is a thread about the impact video games can have and whether they are positive. How is it not relevant listing a few examples on how specific games could improve certain areas of a person?

[guerrilla]

> good will.

I think you meant good faith. They didn't use it as an example though, it was just rhetorical.

[hackernewds]

The question is about incrementality. in those same hours you played CoD, do you think (assuming the endpoint as you suggest is being a softeng) you could have learned more by practicing softeng (even if for half the time)

[BlargMcLarg]

Obviously. Which is why the question isn't about incrementality. It's about whether the choices one was willing to make were beneficial to something that doesn't seem remotely related at first glance.

Most people aren't going to program 10 hours a day. But they might program 8 hours a day and then do 2 hours of entertainment. Maybe those 2 hours of watching TV were better spent gaming in terms of contributing to other aspects in life. Maybe those 2 hours of gaming could've been 2 hours of drawing instead.

If we're talking about incrementality, we'd better question why almost every software company is still treating their employees like idiot savants when games show us how quickly people can learn drastically different concepts, as long as presented correctly.

[323]

Playing with toys does make kids smarter. It's not such a stretch to assume that video games have a benefit too.

[slowmovintarget]

The right kind of toys, yes... and the right kind of video games.

There are toys, and games, that make you dumber. Especially games designed to emphasize the addiction loop and monetize inconvenience. Case in point: Angry Birds.

It used to be a very fun, silly, physics-based game. Now, it is infested with pay-to-unlock consumables that in some cases are required to get all three stars on a level (because you can't knock everything down without an explosion and the default roster of birds for the level doesn't give you that).

The simpler a physical toy is (a ball, simple blocks) the more likely it is to contribute to a child's development. The insidious "I-need-another-outfit-Barbie" on the other hand only trains frivolous spending. Even Lego sets vary in the kind of play they foster.

Playing with toys and games can have cognitive benefits, but, digital or otherwise, there's a quality spectrum parents have to be aware of.

[hypertele-Xii]

> Especially games designed to emphasize the addiction loop and monetize inconvenience.

I think that falls within the purview of gambling.

[Foobar8568]

Pattern recognition+spacial rotation+quick answer to stimuli+repetitive tasks or short term memories, several IQ components are testing these. Kids might have higher IQ because of video games, but poorer to everything else that matters.

[riskable]

> Pattern recognition+spacial rotation+quick answer to stimuli+repetitive tasks

Sounds like we're training kids--through video games--to be fantastic CAD engineers and plumbers.

[nicce]

The cost is no joke.

”Scientific Reports is an open access journal. To publish in Scientific Reports, all authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC) of $1,495.”

[BeetleB]

This is not an unusual charge for open access journals.

The New Journal of Physics, a respected open access physics journal, charges $2225.

https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/journals/new-jo...

[bigmadshoe]

This is becoming very common in academia. The university I used to work for is beginning to require that all research is published in open access journals. Do you know the ludicrous fees universities pay to closed-access journals?

[napier]

“Open access” journal fees are often accounted for by institutional affiliations or grant funding donors. The upside of upfront publication charges is that the research output isn’t paywalled and therefore ideally reaches more eyeballs and brainpans than the conventional route.

[nicce]

That is the upside, but there are many other high reputation peer-reviewed open journals with close to zero payment. Is the domain really worth the cost?

It is kinda messed up, when you adjust the price based on the available money of institutional affiliations or donors. It is just more profits for journal and nothing for authors, while forcing authors to pay.

[Aeolun]

> there are many other high reputation peer-reviewed open journals with close to zero payment

Which are those? The journals that I expect to still be up are the ones that require actual payment for publishing.

[nicce]

For example accepted papers in HICSS are stored publicly without extra cost.

> Starting with HICSS-50, all HICSS publication will be archived and disseminated at no cost to all readers worldwide through ScholarSpace. A complete set of HICSS proceedings will also be made available in the digital library of the Association of Information Systems (AIS).

https://hicss.hawaii.edu/resources/

[svnt]

Most grants in the fields I’ve looked at preclude their use for paying publishing fees.

[versteegen]

Note though that their data comes from the ABCD study, so at least the journal's reputability is not relevant to quality of data collection and most of the experimental design. Edit: of course, this is not a rebuttal of your specific criticisms.

[epgui]

I don't really agree with your qualification of Scientific Reports as "not quite predatory" or "a very low bar". Though it doesn't come close to comparing to Nature or Science, it's a perfectly respectable journal and it publishes quality research.

[_d2qh]

The worst things you can say about Scientific Reports are it doesn't have the same novelty/impact requirements as many journals* and people like to over-emphasize the "Nature" part of the name in a pointles grab for journal prestige. Journals in general can be pretty shady on a case-by-case basis. See "Nano Chopsticks" published in Nano Letters for a good materials science example of straight garbage (laughably obvious image manipulation) getting published in a fancy journal.

*Not really a problem if you correctly believe science should be more than publishing sexy results.

[wing-_-nuts]

>If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.

You know there are more video games styles than FPS right? Strategy games teach patience and discipline, EVE online teaches economics, even the much dismissed 'mindless' fps teach teamwork.

I think it's likely that at least some games do increase intelligence relative to other activities (i.e. mindlessly watching tv) but less so than others like reading.

[dijit]

> mindlessly

I think this is probably more key than you think.

Mindlessly watching junk food TV is not going to help you a lot. It's not very "nutrient rich" (to continue the expression) in terms of knowledge gained.. but you will probably gain some.

Watching documentaries and, crucially, actively watching them is probably very good in terms of how much you learn.

[wing-_-nuts]

It takes a certain kind of nerdy kid to sit down and watch a documentary (not judging, I was that certain kind of nerdy kid). With video games, the user, i.e. child is actively engaged. Video games require more from the consumer. I found myself much more likely to dig into history while playing civilization than I did while watching a documentary for example.

[svnt]

Actively engaged does not mean exercising higher cognitive function, and even less so developing higher cognitive function.

Imagine if e.g. basketball players never practiced but just played for all the marbles at the most competitive level every day when they stepped on the court. You would have chaos and exhausted players.

[jcranberry]

They also did a post hoc analysis using parental education instead of SES by the suggestion of a reviewer and the video game correlation persisted.

[jgalt212]

> In general, these guys have correlations, not causation

You can say that for almost every human study that's not drug based, or very short-term.

[dash2]

No.

* There are tons of randomized controlled trials of policy measures (malaria bednets, minimum income). Many measure long-run outcomes.

* Natural experiments can measure long-run effects. In economic history, sometimes that means centuries.

* Many other designs are plausibly causal. The right instrumental variable, or a regression discontinuity design. In some cases, even a simple diff-in-diff with panel data. This design, nope.

[pocketsand]

The treatment here is regular social media use and video game playing. This not something where you can randomize people to treatment conditions, like you can with malaria.

Likewise, tell me -- what would be a good instrument for estimating a causal effect of video game playing? What measure would plausibly affect intelligence only through video game playing? Where is there a natural experiment that allows for an RD design where young people on one side of the discontinuity play video games and the others do not?

We get it -- you've taken a causal inference or econometrics course and want people to know it.

[dash2]

No, my point is that bad research which conforms to people's priors should not be taken seriously.

There are many experiments on video game playing. Most of them are short run, obviously. But never underestimate researcher ingenuity. Here's a cute paper which uses as an instrument "did your roommate bring a video game to university"? Not beyond critique, but plausible: https://economics.uwo.ca/people/stinebrickner_docs/paper2.pd.... It's also relevant because the dependent variable is how much students study, and their resulting performance.

More to the point, if anyone seriously thinks video games will raise kids' IQ, and can persuade funders of it, they could simply give the treatment group an Xbox. That would be expensive - say $20K-ish - but much cheaper than the benefit of an extra IQ point or 2, over millions of children.

[svnt]

Waldorf schools or Amish communities would be a place to start.

[Mikeb85]

Anecdata but one thing I've noticed over time between those who grew up on video games and those who didn't is that those who were gamers deal better with change, especially WRT learning new software in the workplace, starting new projects, etc...

Obviously though the benefits aren't there if people just mindlessly play the same game all day.

[riskable]

This makes sense: Every game is a new piece of software that has to be installed/inserted with its own interface and mechanics. If you played a lot of games it means you had to get used to using a lot of different interfaces and controls.

[boloust]

Is there a reason to consider the use of a noisy signal as a strong sign of a low-quality study, without addressing whether the noise is correlated with the outcome?

Do we think this study would be improved if it did not control for genetics at all?

[dash2]

It wouldn't be any worse. The question isn't whether the noise is correlated with the outcome. The question is whether the denoised variable would be much more correlated with the outcome (yes), and whether that would change the effect of the focal variable.

In any case, it's a weird thing to control for in a panel study. Why not just use per-person fixed effects? That would eliminate all effects that are constant across individuals.

[DeathArrow]

Good points. If you'd want to find the impact of Digital Media on children's IQ, how would you proceed?

[dash2]

A first shot would be a look at the introduction of digital media in particular places or times. Some people have done this with the internet by using e.g. distance to an ADSL exchange as an instrument.

Or, a randomized controlled trial. If it has an effect worth caring about, then it's worth running an experiment on. A real positive or negative effect would be a big deal for policy.

[svnt]

The question is too big and poorly defined, and IQ as an indicator is both incomplete and too narrow.

[lelanthran]

> If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.

Maybe it's the games you play (CoD) that make imagine that game-playing develops no reasoning skills.

Play something else (starcraft, for example).

[dash2]

I never claimed anything about whether game-playing developed reasoning skills. Indeed, I explicitly said "believe that if you want to." I just said this research didn't prove it.

[barbecue_sauce]

What about Sim City?