2024 Recap: Gaming, Health, and the Science of Winning

Ho-ho-ho, dear friends,

Yes, it's that time of the year. Grab yourself a warm cup of coffee, get cozy, and enjoy the first 2024 recap. In this edition, we go over the most impactful studies and guest episodes concerning gaming and esports performance, and health of gamers. If you want to dive deeper into a specific topic; ez—I linked them for you in each section. 😎 Enjoy!

🏆 What Influences our Gaming Performance?

🧠 Mindset: In his guest episode, SKillous—the StarCraft II progamer from TeamLiquid—took us on a journey through the obstacles he faced and how he overcame them. For instance, handling negative emotions, external factors, disrespecting opponents, and building confidence. What really helped him was not just recognizing these challenges but also working on them with help from coaches and specialists. Definitely a great read and valuable insight from a top player.

🏃 Warming Up: A proper warm-up isn’t just important in traditional sports but also in gaming.

A study showed that physical exercise (20 min. cycling with a 90-sec rest) before playing improved accuracy and speed—the performance increased by 7.6%.

The authors noted that a cognitive warm-up (20 mins. of in-game accuracy practice) might not be as effective. On a side note: another study found that gamers spend about 17% more energy when playing than when doing nothing. However, this does not count as physical exercise (sadly).

👥 Team composition: How your team is put together was a major factor this year influencing gaming performance (and probably beyond). First, being familiar with the people you play influences your performance. Why? The more familiar you are with each other, the more you can specialize e.g., in a specific role (jungle, support, entry fragger... you name it).

Specialist teams have a 1.75% higher chance of winning.

In another episode, we looked at teams of players that have previously played together—whether you and your buddy queuing up together or randomly meeting again on the ladder again. "... teams with more successful previous co-play relations than their opponents were more likely to win," the study found. Interestingly, the study also found that the expertise of players was not the biggest factor in the success of a team, raising the question what is?

Another factor: the thinking styles of the team members. People have different styles of thinking. Is it better for a team to have a diverse composition of thinking-style players? "Our most important finding is that the presence of global-liberal (G-L) style players is positively correlated with match enjoyment." Furthermore, teams with G-L players and without L-C players performed better. Below you can see the two dimensions and the actions they prefer when they fall into a specific combination of thinking styles.

🗺️ External components: Probably the most fascinating study from this year concerned the impact of air pollution on the players, teams, and their performance. Air pollution does physical harm to the body and affects cognitive functioning, and was shown to decrease the winning probability of a weaker team. The difference between stronger and weaker teams widens with increased air pollution. Why?

Weaker teams play more risky, choose less frequent team combs and player lineup in a polluted environment. On the other hand, stronger teams play more conservative.

Interestingly, the tournament structure is a factor too. For instance, being in the upper bracket provides a safety net for teams and players, impacting their APM negatively. Also, we think that when big money is on the line players get super motivated? Well, this might not be the case as the study showed that the amount of prize money has a motivating effect on players, but it is rather small.

🎯 Practice: In this episode, the study we looked at examined the performance and practice hours of professional players. They trained for an average of 31.2h per week, whereby 19.9h were spent in competitive practice. Regarding performance, in-game performance (KDA) was not related to the total amount of hours practiced. What's counterintuitive about this is that one would assume that more practice makes for better performance. In essence, it's not about the amount of practice, it's about the quality of practice.

StarCraft II progamer HeroMarine put together an episode, explaining how he built his perfect training routine that massively improved his performance. He focused on aspects, such as taking care of himself with prioritizing sleep and working out, adapting his streaming habits, or the challenges of balancing all his different duties and goals. Definitely worth reading, and I'm sure you can pick up some aspects to improve yourself from it.

🗣️ Communication: Communication plays a crucial role in team games, but it can sometimes turn toxic. In one study, 1,963,475 matches were analyzed, showing that toxic communication decreased performance. They also noted that:

"Players who do not have significant contact with toxic players tend to be more positive, concentrating on game tactics and socialization."

🧠 Cognitive Abilities: Many studies show that gamers score better on cognitive tests compared to non-gamers. In this episode, I covered a study showing that players' League of Legends rank was linked to cognitive flexibility and decision-making abilities. Also, their KDA was correlated to IQ.

🖱️ Motor Skills: Better gaming skills were found to correlate with better performance in a study, using surgical tasks to evaluate performance. These skills were visuospatial abilities (better at analyzing visual information) and hand-eye coordination.

👥 What Influences Your and Other Gamers' Health?

😰 Stress: Professional player are under high amounts of stress. Things, such as performance expectations, team issues, social media, and health issues, cause them predominantly stress. But how do players deal with stress? The three identified coping strategies commonly used were: balancing life, seeking social support, and sleep management. They also mentioned that looking out for one's health (taking breaks from gaming and practice self-care) was crucial for their health and performance.

In addition to that, Dr. Oliver Leis, an expert in the field of stress in gaming and esports, in his guest episode, dove deep into the various stressors caused by gaming and esports, and how players cope with it. You can see an extensive list in the table below.

But is stress always bad? No. "In fact, recent research has shown that this response to stress can be beneficial and aid performance in stressful situations." Dr. Leis also made a list to reflect on questions that can help you identify what’s bothering you and how to tackle it. The list can be found in the full article.

🧘 Mental health: In the most recent episode, cyberbullying was shown to be a prevalent issue in gaming and esports, where 96% of professional gamers have experienced being bullied online before. Also, the more professional a gamer, the higher the chances of being cyberbullied. All of this can have negative mental health consequences and goes hand in hand with some forms of toxic behavior online.

Studies have found 20% to 80% of gamers having experienced gaming-related pain. Neck, lower back, and upper limb pain were reported the most.

In the episode, we saw that higher levels of competitiveness go hand in hand with an increased chance of wrist pain. Playing more hours, taking less breaks, and having longer gaming sessions increases the chance of experiencing pain e.g., in wrists and shoulders. Reducing game time, taking more breaks, stretching, as well as seeing a health specialist can help prevent pain or reduce pain intensity.

We also discussed a study showing that ~54% of gamers were categorized as problematic gamers. This stems from the fact that the Internet Gaming Disorder was added to the list of mental disorders in 2013. Difficulty controlling your gaming behavior, or problems (e.g., depressive mood, trauma, or loss of a job) can cause problematic gaming. Make sure to evaluate your gaming habits to prevent becoming a problematic gamer—more here.

I hope you liked this first 2024 recap. If you did, let me know using the social below, or via email. Read you next week,

Christian 🙂