Should there be a Gamer IQ scale?

IQ is just a scale or way of measuring how good people are at solving problems.

If there was a Gamer IQ scale it would probably also factor in peoples reaction times and dexterity as well as it would be a scale to measure how good they are at playing games.

Then we could set GIQ levels target ranges for our games to maximise playability.

At the moment if your making a game you have probably played lots of games and your GIQ could be way above average and then when you make your game the average player might find it too hard.

Setting difficulty levels in games could be mapped to the GIQ distribution curve which will probably follow a similar distribution to the IQ bell curve.


If you want your game to sell well it would need to provide people with an average GIQ a good challenge with your difficulty settings allowing for higher and lower ranges.

1. With all the user data obtainable by modern game developers could a Meta analysis of the data provide a GIQ scale?
2. Would potential Esports game developers and gamers want to know more about GIQ and research how malleable it is to training.
3. Could GIQ be used to measure how hard it is for an AI to learn to play a game?
4. Or is GIQ just IQ * Reflexes * Dexterity and therefore already a know studied thing?
5. Are games diverse and varied enough that one scale could not cover them all?
6. Would you want to know yours?

 

IQ was debunked long ago. And problem solving has been broken down into processes that work in most cases, so effective problem solving is one of those things any moron can do so long as they are properly motivated to follow the instructions.

In other words, I see zero practical value in classing people by some arbitrary notion of intelligence.

You can test retention on an audience based on all kinds of demographics, but a classification of IQ is impractical even if the score meant anything.

 

IQ is just a score for a pattern/sequence prediction and logic puzzles.

A GIQ would be rating how good people are at playing games.

 

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How are you going to determine GIQ, practically speaking? Measure thousands of people playing hundreds of hours of games?

And then, after that, how do you take that data and extrapolate it to a larger population in a meaningful way? Like, we've determined that GIQ's in the 60-100 range enjoy our game. Now how do you find the 60-100 range of GIQ gamers?

Seems like you'd spend millions of dollars to define a classification that doesn't give you anything new.

I like why questions, but I have to ask why to your why question. What is problem aiming to solve?

 

Certainly an interesting idea - the need for assessing the dificulty of your game is there. Not sure whether a constant works too well however.
I happen to have watched a youtuber recently who clearly never played a substantial game before but threw herself at both Subnauticas and now at Horizon. It was impressive to see the learning curve from overlooking all the typical tutorial-style gizmos the games gave her and having practically no intuitition for actions and mechanics, to actually playing efficiently. In Subnautica it hardly took 5-10h of playtime.

Therefore meassuring the current skill is likely not helping much.
What you instead need is to meassure people's capability of learning! Unfortunately that is way trickier...

Another question is, even if you have such a scale, how do you connect that with your game?
You still need (professional) gametesters who have the experience to asses the game difficulty in practice and so you haven't really saved anything since they can also tell you about what the dificulties for "easy, normal, hard" for your particular game should be like, if you wanna cover most people.

 

So now everyone is as intelligent as everybody else ?
I have to say that I don't see it in real life.

 

No, it means that the differences can not be qualitatively measured.

Anyway, we don't need a "gaming IQ" because we already have a term for that: gaming literacy.

 

I'll be blunt.

The idea disgusts me and I find it revolting.

This smells a massive can of worms I'd never touch, and it will come with ton of problems, including lawsuits and accusation of discrimination.

IRL IQ test is already borked and while it is measuring something, that something is not necessarily intelligence.

You can also end up in situation where you design the metric wrong and then misdesign your game because of it.

You can design easy games, difficult games, but the moment you design a metric that measures user's ability, it will breed elitism and toxicity around it when it leaks.

Anyone should be able to try anything in videogames, and people should not be shoehorned into a metric. And do keep in mind that people learn and get better at what they do, in time.

 

For many games, having the difficulty level adapt to how well the user is doing can be a good thing to do and I see examples of it all the time.
For instance to avoid placing the user in really hard levels until they have mastered the easier ones, and matchmaking in multiplayer so people of similar ability are playing against each other.

But it seems clear to me that this is best designed on a game by game basis, whether that be a complex ranking system for a multi-player game, or asking the user if they want to increase/decrease difficultly based on their last few results on FIFA.

Don't forget, a lot of games these days will have very in depth analytics on the behaviour patterns of their users:
How many times they restart the same level, when they give up and don't play again, etc.
So developers are already tailoring the difficulty of their games based on shed loads of data without the need for an arbitrary score.

 

I could see this "GIQ" useful for multiplayer match making by matching players of similar scores, or setting AI difficulty or game speed, but those are problems which have already largely been solved with simpler and less controversial solutions.

 

Yeah, player matching of similar scores is literally just called "skill based matchmaking" and it makes a lot of people really mad because it means that they're basically always going to have specific win ratios due to the skill brackets they're placed in and the game difficulty thing has been around since the first Max Payne game, even.

 

I actually hated Max Payne and any other game I've ever played that has adaptive difficulty. They start-off fun and then get frustratingly difficult really fast. Does the system really work? Maybe these games are supposed to be difficult and I'm meant to lose over and over?

To me this indicates another problem with using metrics like this to determine a difficulty level. Just because my response time and dexterity is this or that doesn't mean I want to be held to that. People have different preferences about what degree they want to be challenged regardless of their skill level.

 

This is a side tangent, but matchmaking has really killed multiplayer for me. It makes every round feel samey and boring.

I vastly preferred playing in dedicated servers where:
a. There were people of vastly different skill levels playing.
b. It had regulars and you could start to "know" how some people play and try to play against their play style. (even if that was, "he is much better than me, I should just run away").

And yes, finding a decent dedicated server was a tedious process, but the end result was far superior IMHO.

 

No. Because the game does not measure your fun and optimize around some other arbitrary value. That's an example of "optimizing using wrong metric".

I count myself lucky in sense that I probably met one of the last quake 3 railgun gods. 50-1 duel, me being 1.
That was truly something. The dude knew the map like palm of his hand, and basically was playing chess with me. Knew where everything is, knew every item spawn sound, and was thinking tactically, while bouncing around the map

Probably nothing like that these days.

 

The system was extremely in its infancy then. If you want another example, not much later the same system was implemented in Resident Evil 4 and was handled much better, to the point where most players didn't even notice it was happening.

 

JFC what is this post.

Give the players some dials to tune their difficulty. Not this IQ nonesense.

 

Of course the flip side of having data on GIQ...

Would be what range of gamers can your game satisfy what's it GIQ range or limits?

 

You're extrapolating much too far here. This question's premise hinges upon the idea that GIQ is something that exists and can be quantitatively measured when even regular IQ doesn't fit that bill.

 

Pretty sure if this was a poll it would be 100% no.

 

I wish I lived in arowx's universe. Seems like such a happy place.

 

Think of it as a skill or complexity rating:

Games with a super low GIQ, could be:

• OXO
• Pong
• Pac Man

And games with a very high GIQ could be:

• Chess
• GO
• Strategy Games
• RTS
• Fortnight with it's Building / Fighting against other players.

And as people have mentioned some games are harder to learn and master than others.

So maybe a GIQ could be measured by how long it takes the average gamer to master it?

 

This is absolutely ridiculous and I think you know that. None of these things have anything specifically to do with games and instead are problem solving and reaction time factors which are all game agnostic.

 

I'm doubtful any place that labels you based on a value outside of your control that has been proven inaccurate would be a happy place to live.

 

Off topic. Pointless. Closed.