Does Minecraft Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ

Minecraft has not been shown to make anyone smarter: no study has measured IQ before and after playing it. The largest trial, a preregistered study of 885 Irish primary school pupils, found that six weeks of Minecraft Education lessons did not improve spatial thinking more than ordinary lessons did, a difference of about 0.06 of a standard deviation, which would be less than one point on an IQ scale.

Smaller laboratory studies found that a few weeks of exploring a Minecraft world improved scores on one demanding memory task. This page covers why the game has a brainy reputation, what those memory studies measured, what the classroom and creativity trials found, and why the children and adults who love Minecraft may differ from everyone else before they place their first block.

Minecraft is an open-world "sandbox" game: players explore a huge world made of blocks, gather materials and build whatever they like, from huts to working calculators wired with redstone, the game's version of electrical circuits. That looks like serious planning and engineering, so parents often describe it as a digital version of construction toys. Our page on whether LEGO makes children smarter found that building toys train building, with little sign of broader gains, and the same question applies here.

The classroom edition adds to the impression. Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, sells Minecraft Education to schools, and many published reports describe enthusiastic pupils. In an Irish survey of 173 primary school students, most said the platform offered good chances to learn, especially for creativity and collaboration, and that it was easy and enjoyable to use. A study of 186 children aged 8 to 10 reported that game-based lessons helped them learn basic science concepts, judged by tests given at the end of the course. Reports like these show that children enjoy the game and can learn lesson content through it. They do not measure intelligence, and most lack a comparison group of children taught another way.

Headlines about Minecraft and the brain mostly trace back to one research group at the University of California, Irvine, whose studies are covered next.

Craig Stark's laboratory studies the "hippocampus," a brain structure needed to form new memories and to find your way around. In rodents, a richer living environment improves hippocampal memory, and the team asked whether exploring a large virtual world could do something similar for people.

• The Super Mario study (2015): Young adults who had not been gaming were assigned to two weeks of Super Mario 3D World, two weeks of Angry Birds, or no game. Only the 3D game group improved on a memory task that requires telling apart very similar pictures, a skill called "lure discrimination."

• Minecraft in young adults (2019): Clemenson and colleagues randomly assigned 82 young adults with no Minecraft experience, recruited at the University of California, Irvine, to one of four Minecraft conditions for two weeks, playing up to 45 minutes a day. Three groups improved on lure discrimination; a group that built freely in a flat, empty world did not. Gains were larger for people who explored more of the world and built more complex structures. Ordinary recognition memory did not change. All four groups played Minecraft, so there was no group that played nothing.

• Minecraft in middle age (2021): Stark and colleagues tested adults aged 40 to 49. A no-game group (30 people) went from a lure discrimination score of 0.38 to 0.44, while an exploration or guided-building group (35 people) went from 0.36 to 0.51 after about 30 minutes of play a day for four weeks. That difference was statistically significant, but only just (p < .05). Compared with a third group that also played Minecraft, building freely in a flat world, the difference was not significant (p = .24).

These are well-designed small studies, and they consistently show that rich, novel 3D game worlds can improve one specific kind of memory over a few weeks. The outcome is a single memory task, and it does not measure IQ or reasoning. The 2021 study had no long-term follow-up; the team's earlier games studies found little decline 2 to 8 weeks after play ended.

The strongest test of Minecraft as an educational tool is Slattery and colleagues' cluster randomised trial in Ireland. Thirty-two classes of fifth and sixth year pupils, average age 11.5, were randomly assigned either to a six-week Minecraft Education programme built into the curriculum or to ordinary teaching. Teachers spent about two hours a week on the programme, the design was preregistered, and pupils were tested before the programme, straight after it and again six weeks later.

• Spatial thinking: There was no overall improvement compared with the control classes. In the authors' posted version of the paper, the difference in spatial gains was d = 0.06 at post-test and d = 0.04 at follow-up, both with confidence intervals that included zero. Fifth year pupils did improve more than sixth year pupils, possibly because they were more engaged or started with lower spatial scores.

• Creativity: Teachers felt the programme boosted creativity, but measured creativity was higher in the control group at post-test.

The trial was funded by Microsoft Education Ireland, and three of the authors were Microsoft employees. The team still reported the null result plainly.

Creativity has one striking positive result. Blanco-Herrera, Gentile and Rokkum randomly assigned 352 undergraduates to play Minecraft freely, play Minecraft with instructions to be creative, play a driving game or watch a TV show. Those who played Minecraft without instructions scored higher on the creativity measures that followed. The group told to be creative did not, which suggests the result depends on how people play as much as on the game itself. Creativity tests also measure something different from intelligence.

Spatial ability does matter for IQ scores, which is why claims about Minecraft and spatial skills deserve a fair test. Our guide to visual-spatial reasoning explains how these abilities appear on IQ tests. So far, Minecraft lessons have not moved them.

Psychologists separate "near transfer," getting better at the trained activity and tasks very like it, from "far transfer," gains in broad abilities such as general intelligence. Minecraft fits the near-transfer pattern. People get better at Minecraft, and exploring a rich world can sharpen a related memory skill, but the large classroom trial found nothing on general spatial tests. Sala and Gobet's reviews of chess, music and working-memory training found that far-transfer effects shrink as study quality improves. For video games in general, Sala, Tatlidil and Gobet's meta-analysis found that game training raised cognitive test scores by about 0.07 standard deviations, essentially zero after correcting for publication bias. Our page on video games and IQ covers that research in full.

No study has compared the IQ scores of Minecraft players with non-players, so the question of whether players are smarter has no direct answer. Any such comparison would face familiar confounds. Children who spend hours on elaborate builds may already have stronger spatial skills before they start. They are also more likely to have a computer at home and parents with the education and money to encourage the hobby, both of which predict higher test scores. In the creativity study, people who were more creative to begin with also reported different gaming habits. All of these make the game look more powerful than it is.

Minecraft also has a following among autistic children, and therapists run Minecraft social groups. The evidence is thin. A 2026 pilot study of 11 autistic children aged 10 to 12 found non-significant improvements in social skills, and a 2023 description of therapeutic Minecraft groups noted that formal research in this area is sparse. These programmes aim at social connection, and none has measured IQ. Families considering one should ask a psychologist or speech-language pathologist how it fits with other support.

No study has shown that Minecraft raises IQ. Exploring a Minecraft world improved one memory task in small studies, and a large school trial found no improvement in spatial thinking.

It can be a creative, social hobby, and there is no evidence that it harms thinking. The research does not support claims that it boosts intelligence, so it is best treated as a game children enjoy.

Children can learn lesson content through it, and many say they enjoy it. In the largest randomised trial, six weeks of Minecraft Education did not improve spatial thinking or creativity compared with ordinary lessons.

In laboratory studies, two to four weeks of exploring a Minecraft world improved a demanding memory task that depends on the hippocampus. Ordinary recognition memory did not change, and the effect has not been shown to last for years.

The memory studies suggest that games with large 3D worlds to explore do more for that one task than simple 2D games. For broad cognitive ability, the meta-analytic evidence shows near-zero training effects for video games of every kind.

Minecraft is a rich, creative game that teaches people to play Minecraft very well, and exploring its worlds may give a small, short-term lift to one kind of memory. There is no evidence that it raises IQ, and the best classroom trial found no gain in spatial thinking. If you want to know where your reasoning ability actually stands, take a full-length online IQ test.

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2. Slattery, E. J., Butler, D., Marshall, K., Barrett, M., Hyland, N., O'Leary, M., & McAvinue, L. (2023). Effectiveness of a Minecraft Education intervention for improving spatial thinking in primary school children: A mixed methods two-level cluster randomised trial [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. [doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/75y4c](. doi.org

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6. Clemenson, G. D., Henningfield, C. M., & Stark, C. E. L. (2019). Improving hippocampal memory through the experience of a rich Minecraft environment. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 57. [doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00057](. doi.org

7. Stark, C. E. L., Clemenson, G. D., Aluru, U., Hatamian, N., & Stark, S. M. (2021). Playing Minecraft improves hippocampal-associated memory for details in middle aged adults. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 3, 685286. [doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2021.685286](. doi.org

8. Blanco-Herrera, J. A., Gentile, D. A., & Rokkum, J. N. (2019). Video games can increase creativity, but with caveats. Creativity Research Journal, 31(2), 119-131. [doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2019.1594524](. doi.org

9. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org

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11. Thirumanickam, A., Attrill, S., Welz, N., & Hobbs, D. (2026). Enhancing social collaboration in autistic pre-teens through Minecraft. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 28(5), 1161-1172. [doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2026.2630836](. doi.org

12. Kilmer, E., Spangler, J., & Kilmer, J. (2023). Therapeutically applied Minecraft groups with neurodivergent youth. F1000Research, 12, 216. [doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.129090.2](. doi.org

Hero image: Minecraft - Taiga (screenshot), by Xbox México, CC BY 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.