Games Can Make You Smarter

Chess has always been a great game for brain

Plenty of us will remember our mothers shouting at us to stop playing those video games or ‘our eyes will go square’ and ‘our brain will turn to mush’. Whilst there’s something to be said for not wasting an entire life playing games, there’s a growing school of thought that gaming might actually do quite the opposite of turning brains to mush; it might, in fact, make us smarter. Whether you believe in it or not, there are certainly some games that have more intellectual credentials than others and these are the best of them.

Minecraft

Minecraft allows endless creativity

Minecraft is one of the most popular games at the moment and this is largely down to its unrivalled open world format. The worlds that you can explore in Minecraft are huge and this means that there is endless room for creativity. One of the forms of intelligence that is the most often overlooked is creative intelligence, but it’s also one of the most important. Without creativity, we’d struggle to think laterally about things and this way of thinking is almost always what leads to the greatest inventions.

Games like Minecraft encourage creativity and give players total freedom to build the world that they desire. This unbridled creativity is useful for winning Minecraft tournaments and creating structures that will impress friends, but it’s more than that. Freedom for creativity fosters exactly the kind of thinking that we need in the next generation of inventors and problem solvers.

Chess

Chess mastery has long been an indicator of high intelligence and that still stands true to this day. Becoming a grandmaster is an enormous challenge, requiring you to achieve an ELO rating of 2500 or more, or to achieve two favourable results in a tournament. Chess is such a good indicator of intelligence because it is what is known as a game of complete information. This means that both players can see all of the pieces on the board, meaning that from this knowledge they can know any of the possible moves which can be played. The only guesswork in chess is anticipating what your opponent might do next.

You need immense logic to win, as well as an infallible knowledge of the capabilities of each piece. People spend hours and hours poring over texts on chess strategy and still there are some people that outshine everyone with relative ease. If you want to really flex your chess skills then researching some opening moves is a great place to start. A solid opener is a really important part of a game and there are endless books and YouTube videos that you can watch and read to help with your studies.