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No video game has been shown to require the highest IQ. Research has studied links between game experience, game performance, and cognitive abilities, but it has not produced a reliable ranking of games by the IQ needed to play them.
Why there is no highest-IQ game
“IQ requirement” is not the same as difficulty, strategic depth, or how well an artificial-intelligence system performs. A game can demand planning, memory, attention, or reasoning without having a measured minimum IQ for players. The studies available examine particular people, tasks, or games; they do not establish a universal scale for comparing the intelligence required by every video game.
That distinction matters because a correlation between a player characteristic and game performance does not show that a game raises IQ, nor does it identify the IQ someone needs to play well.
What studies of players and games have measured
Video-game experience and cognitive tests
A 2015 study in Psychological Science examined video-game experience alongside measures of working memory, fluid intelligence, and attention control. In an extreme-groups analysis, experienced players did better than nonplayers on some measures. But when the researchers analyzed the full range of participants, nearly all relationships were near zero. The authors said their results cast doubt on claims that playing video games leads to enhanced cognitive abilities. The study did not identify a game with a higher IQ requirement. Read the study in Psychological Science.
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Games as possible intelligence tests
Researchers have also explored whether performance on leisure-game tasks or game puzzles can help measure intelligence. A 2016 paper discusses those efforts, including designing an intelligence test from game puzzles. A separate 2015 commercial-game study involved 188 university undergraduates and examined relationships between game characteristics and intelligence measures. These are investigations into whether games can serve as cognitive tasks or measurement tools—not evidence that one game demands the highest IQ. Read the 2016 paper on measuring intelligence with video games. Read the 2015 commercial-game study.
Expertise in multiplayer online battle arena games
A 2017 paper examined video-game expertise and fluid intelligence in multiplayer online battle arena games. Its reported question includes a possible association between IQ and game rank. Even if an association is found in that setting, it would not establish a minimum IQ to play, prove that playing raises IQ, or show that this genre outranks all others. Read the study on MOBA expertise and fluid intelligence.
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Game complexity and AI performance do not measure human IQ
Stratego is sometimes cited in discussions of games that are hard for computers. It is a board game, not a video game. DeepMind describes it as a game of hidden information, bluffing, and long sequences of decisions, with about 1066 starting configurations and game-tree complexity of 10535; the same account gives 10360 for Go. Those figures describe possible configurations and decision sequences, not the intelligence or IQ of human players. DeepMind also reported that its Stratego-playing AI, DeepNash, achieved an 84% win rate against top expert human players on the Gravon platform. That result measures AI performance in that context, not a human IQ threshold. Read DeepMind’s account of DeepNash and Stratego.
Likewise, a 2020 Nature paper reported that MuZero achieved state-of-the-art performance on 57 Atari games and matched AlphaZero’s superhuman performance in Go, chess, and shogi. These are results about an AI system’s planning and game performance, not a ranking of the IQ required of people playing those games. Read the MuZero paper in Nature.
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How to compare games without turning them into an IQ ranking
If you want to discuss which games are demanding, name the specific challenge and the evidence behind it rather than assigning an unsupported IQ score. For example:
- Memory, attention, or fluid reasoning: say whether a study tested players on cognitive measures and what relationship it reported.
- Hidden information and bluffing: describe the decisions a game presents; do not treat that feature as an IQ measurement.
- Game-tree complexity: identify it as a measure of possible states or sequences, not human intelligence.
- AI results: specify the system and the benchmark or opponents involved; an AI win rate says nothing direct about a human player’s IQ.
Keeping those measures separate lets you talk meaningfully about strategy and skill without claiming that a game has a proven IQ requirement.
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