Do Gamers Actually Type Faster? I Ran the Numbers

This Started as a 2 AM Discord Argument

A buddy of mine dropped this line in our Discord server at like 2 in the morning: "Gamers type faster than normal people. It's not even close."

I couldn't let it go.

He's a Valorant player who practically lives in Discord. Fast typist? Sure. But so is my mom — she's a paralegal who bangs out court documents all day. Neither of them types fast BECAUSE of their main activity. They type fast because they both spend a ridiculous number of hours on a keyboard.

But I didn't have data. Just opinions. And opinions at 2 AM in a Discord server tend to spiral into absolutely nothing productive.

So I decided to actually test it. I rounded up 30 people who call themselves gamers — a mix of PC, console, and mobile — and 20 who don't game at all. Had everyone take the same three-minute typing test on TypingFastest. Same text, same settings, same rules. No warm-ups. First attempt only.

What happened next split the argument wide open. One group blew the other out of the water, but the reason WHY had nothing to do with gaming reflexes, hand-eye coordination, or "gamer skills." It was something way more boring — and way more useful if you actually want to get faster.

The Numbers — Split by Platform — Tell a Very Different Story

Photo by Sean Do / Unsplash

Here's where it gets interesting. I didn't just ask "do you game?" I asked what platform they primarily play on. And that one distinction changed everything.

PC gamers (16 people) averaged **58 WPM** with 93% accuracy. Solid. Several hit 70+, and one monster from my Overwatch group clocked 94 WPM on his first try. These are people who spend their gaming sessions typing in team chat, trash-talking in Discord, and alt-tabbing between games and browsers all night.

Console gamers (10 people) averaged **42 WPM** with 91% accuracy. Almost identical to the non-gamers. A couple of them were visibly uncomfortable at the keyboard — one guy told me he hasn't typed anything longer than a Google search in months because everything on PlayStation uses voice chat.

Mobile gamers (4 people) averaged **39 WPM** with 89% accuracy. Lowest of any group. Fast thumbs on a touchscreen? Probably. On a physical keyboard? They were hunting and pecking like they'd never seen one before.

Non-gamers (20 people) averaged **41 WPM** with 90% accuracy. Right in line with the average adult typing speed of about 40 WPM that most studies report.

The gap between PC gamers and everyone else was **16 WPM**. That's massive — it's the difference between looking competent in a job interview and getting passed over. But the gap between console gamers and non-gamers? Basically statistical noise. Two points.

So when people say "gamers type faster" — they're accidentally right, but only about one very specific subset of gamers. Console and mobile players? Their thumbs might be lightning. Their fingers on a full keyboard? Not any faster than someone who's never touched a video game.

One thing that surprised me was the accuracy spread. I expected gamers — who are supposedly used to high-pressure split-second decisions — to be more accurate under time pressure. Nope. PC gamers had slightly better accuracy (93% vs 90%), but console gamers were actually the least consistent, with wild swings between their three test attempts. The typing test itself doesn't care about your K/D ratio.

It's Not the Gaming — It's the Keyboard Hours

Here's the thing nobody in that Discord argument wanted to admit: gaming doesn't teach you to type. Spending time on a keyboard teaches you to type. And PC gaming just happens to come bundled with a massive amount of keyboard time that has nothing to do with the actual games.

Think about what a typical PC gamer does in an evening. They launch a game — maybe type in team chat during loading screens. They alt-tab to Discord and type out messages between matches. They look something up on Reddit and type a comment. They argue about balance patches on a forum. They search for a YouTube video. They message a friend on Steam.

All of that is typing practice. None of it is gaming.

A large-scale study from Aalto University that tracked over 168,000 volunteers found that the single strongest predictor of typing speed wasn't age, education, or profession. It was **consistency of finger-to-key mapping** — hitting the same key with the same finger every time. PC gamers develop this consistency not from WASD movement, but from all the surrounding typing they do. Chat. Forums. Discord servers. Search bars. They're basically doing accidental typing practice for hours every day without realizing it.

Console gamers don't get any of that keyboard exposure. Their fingers are wrapped around a controller. Their "typing" happens with a painfully slow on-screen keyboard navigated by thumbstick. There's no muscle memory building. No home row awareness. No finger-to-key mapping at all.

So if you're a console gamer hoping your gaming habit is secretly making you a faster typist — I'm sorry. It's not. You'd genuinely get more WPM improvement from a single week of deliberate practice than from an entire year of controller gaming.

But if you're a PC gamer who already types fast and never really knew why — now you do. It's not reflexes. It's not hand-eye coordination. It's just volume.

WASD Doesn't Count as Touch Typing (Sorry)

I know some PC gamers are going to push back on this. "But I use a keyboard every day! My left hand lives on WASD!"

Right. And that's exactly the problem.

WASD gaming trains your left hand to hover over four keys — W, A, S, D — plus a handful of modifiers like Shift, Ctrl, Space, E, R, F, and Q. That's maybe 10-12 keys total, all crammed into a tight cluster on one side of the board. Your right hand? It's on the mouse. Not touching the keyboard at all.

Touch typing uses all 10 fingers across all 30+ keys on the main section of the keyboard. The overlap between WASD gaming and actual typing is almost zero. I've met gamers with 5,000+ hours in shooters who still look down at the keyboard to type a sentence. Their left hand is lightning on WASD, but ask them to hit J or semicolon without looking and they're completely lost.

The gamers in my test who typed fastest weren't the ones with the highest rank in their games. They were the ones who also did other keyboard-heavy things outside of gaming — coding, writing essays for school, chatting obsessively on Discord, or working day jobs that required heavy typing. Gaming was just one piece of a bigger keyboard-use pie.

If you want gaming to ACTUALLY improve your typing, you've gotta bridge that gap deliberately. Use in-game chat more often. Type callouts instead of relying on voice. Write out strategies in Discord channels instead of sending voice memos. Convert every opportunity to communicate into a keyboard opportunity.

Or — and here's the play I've seen work best — take that competitive energy you already have and point it at something specifically designed to train typing speed. Which brings me to the thing that actually moved the needle for the gamers in my group who wanted to get faster.

Racing Made Them Care — That's the Whole Secret

Photo by Fredrick Tendong / Unsplash

Here's what surprised me most about this whole experiment. After the initial typing test, I had everyone in the gamer group try multiplayer typing races on TypingFastest. Just for fun. No stakes. No pressure.

They went absolutely feral.

The same people who treated the solo typing test like a boring homework assignment suddenly cared — a LOT — about beating the person next to them. One guy who hit 52 WPM on the test ran three consecutive races and peaked at 61 because he flat-out refused to let his friend beat him. A woman who averaged 47 WPM pushed to 55 after she lost her first race by half a second and demanded a rematch immediately.

This is the thing about gamers: they don't just want to improve. They want to WIN. Solo typing tests don't scratch that competitive itch. But a real-time race against another human being, where you can watch them pulling ahead on screen? That triggers every competitive instinct a gamer has ever developed.

And it works. Competition-driven practice is genuinely more effective than solo drilling for most people. You push harder when someone else is on the line. Your focus sharpens because losing feels personal. The adrenaline keeps you from zoning out mid-test. I went deep on this in my ranking of the best multiplayer typing race games — and TypingFastest's racing mode is still the fastest way to jump into a competitive race without sign-up friction or ads killing your flow.

There's a reason the leaderboard on TypingFastest skews heavily toward gamers. They found the competitive hook, and they couldn't stop coming back. A few people from my original test group still race every single morning as a warm-up before they boot up their actual games. It's become part of their routine.

If you've got the competitive drive but haven't pointed it at your typing speed yet, try a race. Seriously. It takes ten seconds to start, there's no account required, and I guarantee you'll care about your WPM more after your first loss than you ever did staring at a solo test screen. The garage even lets you customize your race car — which sounds dumb until you're on your fifteenth race refusing to stop until you unlock the next tier.

My WPM jumped from 72 to 86 once I started racing daily instead of just running solo tests. For the gamers in my group, the average improvement after two weeks of daily racing was 11 WPM. Not from drills. Not from typing courses. Not from watching YouTube tutorials. Just from competition and a keyboard they already knew how to use.

Grab a mechanical keyboard that won't hold you back, pull up a race, and see what happens when you aim gamer brain at something that actually transfers to the rest of your life.