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League of Legends Rank Predicts IQ, Study Finds (plos.org)
limbicsystem writes: A new publication in the journal PLOS ONE shows that your rank in League of Legends (LoL) correlates with your intelligence quotient (IQ). Games like LoL and DOTA II apparently depend on the same cognitive resources that underlie tests of fluid intelligence. That means that proficiency in those games peaks at the same age as raw IQ -- about 25 -- while scores in more reaction-time based games like Destiny or Battlefield seem to decline from the teens onwards. The researchers suggest that the massive datasets from these online games could be used to assess population-level cognitive health in real-time across the globe. The authors have a nice FAQ (and open datasets) here.
It's not true that IQ (more commonly 'g' in professional literature) means nothing, there is extensive psychometric studies about what it means and what is in it and what isn't. Some aspects of it is observable in biological measurements.
https://source.wustl.edu/2012/07/brain-imaging-can-predict-how-intelligent-you-are-study-finds/
It means that performance across a wide, but not comprehensive, variety of cognitive tasks is correlated in individuals, i.e. if you are good at some of them, it is highly more likely than chance you will be above average on the others. There are of course many other tasks and demands on human performance which aren't related.
Nevertheless, it is true that people who boast about their IQ are losers.
IQ results are proven to predict success in a lot of things. Thinking that IQ does not measure intelligence is a sign of low IQ. You can go ahead and argue that there are other types of intelligence, but that argument does little other than conflate skills with intelligence. IQ measures your ability to solve problems. IQ tests a are reproducible, consistent, and predictive. That so many people write it off as pseudoscience proves only how stupid most people are.