We Win or We Learn

Translating Sport Psychology into Esports - Building and maintaining Success in Elite Esports

League of Legends (LoL) is currently the most popular Esport worldwide[1]. Esports popularity is also highlighted by its inclusion in the 2024 Paris Olympics[1].

Success

Forbes (Photo: Riot Games)

The moment in 2016 where SK Telecom T1 marked their names in the history books being the first to win three LoL Championships and achieve back-to-back titles

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Growing Research

Academic Research in Esports initially began around the topic of viewership when the numbers at the LoL World Championships surpassed traditional sporting events such as the World Series, Super Bowl league, NHL, and the NBA [2, 3, 4, 5].

Academia research surrounding Esports is growing fast, with some of the first few physical intervention studies [6,7]. Despite a few published meta-analyses of video game research and cognitive abilities, there are insufficient empirical studies to compare effect sizes with insufficient empircal studies to compare effect sizes in the field of Esports [8].

Additionally, it is important to distinguish that some studies contain sampling of self-reported measure of competitive play - often with a wide-range of actual skill/competing level & experience which causes much room for overgeneralization - specifically among the elite level of Esports [6, 8, 9, 10] as professionals may varying experiences and perspectives to performing under pressure compared to the average player.

Pressure and Choking

Photo: (Riot Games)

League of Legends Worlds Championships 2017 - The iconic 'Faker' from SK Telecom T1, lost in the grand finals attempting to push for a historic three-peat - reverse swept by South Korean rival Samsung Galaxy at the Bird's Nest in Beijing with over 60 million unique viewers [11].

“The constant pressure of having to perform and being self-motivated puts a lot of stress on people. I never enjoyed anything outside of gaming because I thought I shouldn’t be doing this; I’m wasting my time” [12]

Sport-related anxiety from traditional sport athletes is similar to Esports competitors [13] - suggesting that although style of competition is different between traditional sports and Esports, the competitive anxiety produces similar symptoms. Additionally, the heart rates of players during matches are comparable to physical exercise [7] - contradicting a social belief that Esports players "just sit down and play". Research has also suggests there are often various and multi-layers of physical [6,7], psychosocial [14] as well as psychological [15] mechanisms at play in competitive Esports.

“Choking” is a term in competitive sports yet to have a universal scientific definition, but generally used to describe an athlete’s dramatic drop in performance under pressure [16]

Madison and colleagues are the first to explore Choke & Clutch in Competitive Esports [17]. She offered a personal quote: "I'm surprised there is no previous research in Esports around choke & clutch"- suggesting the elementary groundwork in many finer topic areas till date. Their findings on the identification of choking in Esports can be utilized for future studies to support performance in high-pressure environments tailored specifically to Esports, representing an initial step in the empirical exploration of choking and clutching in competitive Esport contexts.

For instance, one of the strongest correlations to choking in Esports was found to be Reinvestment [17]. The reinvestment theory explains that choking happens when an athlete “reinvests” explicit knowledge and conscious-controlled processing when under pressure [18]. Although reinvestment studied in traditional sports is applied when explicit rules govern the motoric components of the activity, activities such as chess with no motoric component provides a valuable source of failure under pressure - suggesting that reinvestment applies readily to Esports contexts as well [19].

In the world of Elite Esports athletes, the main biggest stressor among professional players interviewed were internal expectations and team issues [20]. Self-expectancy can often lead to performance anxiety during moments that matters most which can result in athletes overthinking situations - mistrusting their automaticity in the game [17], being a pivoting point towards choking depending on how this anxiety is recognized and addressed.

Hence, this means that Esports athletes prone to reinvestment in a first-person shooter can adopt explicit rules such as, “I must keep my mouse cursor still over the persons head and left click the mouse to pull the trigger” which may cause a choke during key moments when the pressure mounts. [17]

Coaching Perspectives

Adopting purposeful sampling - I did a pilot questionnaire study among Elite Esports athletes within EU in order to find out more about player perspectives on the coaching they have received - (Example of a questionnaire attached below)

The cut off point for my sample size to be defined as "Elite" is Masters Rank in LoL as well as semi-professional experience. The Master rank in LoL being the top 0.27% of players, Grandmaster being the top 0.016% of players, & Challenger being the top 0.0071% of players in the EUW (Europe West) Server with about 4.2 Million players in this server alone [21, 22]

In total - there were 50 participants - Master (n = 19), Grandmaster (n =18), and Challenger (n = 13) players. Results:

In summary, player perspectives on the coaching they receive suggests suboptimal results. A quick scope at the mean suggests a majority "Disagree" with a clear vision (M = 2.26) and challenge (M = 2.54) they received. Support seems to be universally leaning towards "Agree" (M = 3.44).

While this has implications towards the quality of coaching in semi-professional level Esports, there are indeed many nuances to the case - including low barriers of entry to coaching in semi-professional play, possibly due to the unsustainable financial ecosystem for LoL within the Esports organizations there, causing them to generally be passion projects with low return on investment [23]. However, it is important to note that this is an anecdotal piece of pilot work, serving to probe further investigation, considering it's limited sample size and possibly weak questionaire validity in terms of question structure with no verified reproductability yet.

Resilience

In a fast-paced stress-filled environment - resilience is a critical skill to serve as a mental shield against mental distress and to continue to strive for peak performance among various circumstances [24]. In Esports research, preliminary pilot studies has not looked into resilience in depth, occasionally used just as a passing statement for further studies [25, 26]. Recent work done around resilience reveals a suggestive insight that mental toughness influences stress and coping processes, and thus impacting achievement level in competitive esports [9, 10].

Resilience can be seen as: “An interdisciplinary construct that is often defined in a broad manner, from a stationary trait to a dynamic capacity, which helps individuals to deal with and adjust to adversity" [27, 28, 29, 30, 31]. There are generally two forms of Resilience - coined "Robust" Resilience (the ability to maintain wellbeing and performance under pressure) and "Rebound" Resilience (the ability to bounce back to optimal performance during setbacks) [28]. This is extremely applicable in the high-pressure world of Esports. One of the biggest stress factors expressed by Esport athletes is to bounce back to optimal play/mindset after a mistake, or keeping a competitive mindset when "playing from behind"[12] - which means to attempt to turn the game state around into your favour while in a losing position, this is where rebound resilience will be directly effective.

Esports at the elite level demands high-performance - this is where not only the players themselves, but also the coaching and management staff - need to have a united priority towards understanding and establishing an effective performance environment to build resilience, enabling the athletes to strive for peak performance [32]. Additionally in Esports, cohesion is at the heart of better team performance as players team-up side by side in the virtual world [33], just alike the mutual positive influence between team cohesion and performance in traditional team-sport contexts [34]

Building Resilience and Cohesion in your Team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gObc2RMaFsc&ab_channel=ResilientYouthReseachGroup

In traditional sports research around building resilience, one of the proposed ways to build resilience is to complete mental fortitude training [28]. This is characterized by three building blocks:

1. Personal qualities refer to an individuals' personality and psychological skills [28]. While personality is multi-layered consisting of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and self-narrative identities [35], it is generally consistent patterns of thoughts and behaviour. Hence, psychological skills is the focus as they are malleable personal qualities. Traditional approaches include skills such as positive & negative self-talk both having empircal support to be effective for performance [36, 37] or the use of mental imagery improving sport performance such as golf [38] However, in Esports, there has yet to be empirical support for self-talk measures or mental imagery to be effective, self-talk was even found to be significantly less in Esport athletes [39] - highlighting the nuance differences that have to be carefully addressed before universal application of working methodologies. There has however been recent positive results of motor imagery training improving Esport performance [40, 41].

2. A performance environment is characterized by varying levels of challenge and support - with the facilitative environment (High Challenge + High Support) being the only environment reliably related to positive performance in the challenge-support matrix for developing resilience [28]

Hence, for resilience to be developed for sustained success, a facilitative environment needs to be created and maintained. If too much challenge and not enough support is provided, an unrelenting environment will affect well-being; on the flip side, if too much support and not enough challenge is provided, a comfortable environment will not enhance performance [28].

To challenge your players, a coach can set high expectations and encourage stepping out of comfort zones with developmental feedback on progression, this serves to instill accountability and responsibility [28]. Naturally, there also need to be support in terms of enabling your players to develop their personal qualities while encouraging improvement and building trust - with individualized interactions, adopting a supportive presence.

3. Arguably the most important factor is the development and maintenance of a challenge mindset, to interpret stressors positively [28]. Closely linked to the importance of a growth-mindset that Olympic champions all adopt - where individuals believe their talents can be developed through hard work rather than fixed mindset (where talents are innate, gifts from birth) [42]. The biopsychosocial model of stress hinges a positive interpretation of stressors (to view stressors as challenges) on a primary appraisal (the relevance of the situation in relation to one's goals and implications to what is at stake) and a secondary appraisal (the availability of coping resources to manage the situation) [43].

In Esports, an example of this will be players looking at their competition and noticing higher ranks than their own, you first think about how your opponents may affect your decision-making and skill execution, and how this may impact your reputation (primary appraisal). Next, you take into account your mental and physical (mouse-movement) strategies you have at your disposal (secondary appraisal). You will either then evaluate and adopt a threat mindset (feeling threatened and afraid you may not perform as well among such strong opponents) or a challenge mindset (encouraging the opportunity for a great challenge to compete among these players and perform well). Although not yet researched in Esports - traditional sports presents effectiveness of a challenge mindset to performance increment [44, 45]. Additionally, the way we think about our own thoughts and feelings (our meta-cognition and -emotion) are also crucial to adopt a challenge mindset as the way we interpret our thoughts and feelings directs back to how we then appraise our situations. In an Esports context, players who interpret pre-game anxiety as helpful rather than harmful will then have stronger challenge appraisals.

Hence, there is much nuance and complex strings of interactions to building resilience, but a good step forward in Esports in direct relation to performance and wellbeing - will be to first recognize and identify the importance of resilience, both among players and teams, in order to then identify and work on player qualities, develop and maintain a facilitative ennvironment, and encourage a challenge mindset.

To build cohesion within a team - leaders should adopt a democratic decision-making style to encourage player input - which positively impacts team cohesion, displaying greater social support and team-recognition [46]. On the flip side, leaders who adopt an autocratic style (i.e. acting independently in decision making) is found to negatively impact team cohesion [46]. Team building interventions should focus on building a collective team identity, which can be done by bringing players, coaches and management staff together in order to achieve shared goals and objectives, shown to be the most effective way of developing group cohesion [47]. In short, there is no one size fits all methodology for this, but some examples can include having a bi-weekly gathering to play any form of team-games together (Pummel Party, Phasmophobia, among many titles).

Leadership

In addition to the above mentioned measures of building resilience and cohesion, Coaches fill a key leadership role when it comes to facilitating player success, this can be done through Vision, Support, and Challenge [48] Although it is vital to note that this is not specific only to coaches - players have a vital role as well. Leadership is not a position, but a mindset.

In Esports,

1. Vision comes down to creating and aligning your team's goals and together towards an inspirational future. This comes down to developing and maintaining an aligned & achievable goal for the team, well communicated with everyone's understanding and motivation to pursue together [49]

2. Support comes down to providing the necessary services, knowledge, and information to your teammates in order to achieve the shared vision [50]. This comes down to providing knowledge to directly improve your player's performance, encouraging any venues to improvement, showing empathy and offering encouragement to enhance motivation. In addition - to clearly identify individual roles and encourage player’s input (democratic leadership style).

3. Challenge comes down to challenging your teammates to achieve the vision. This comes down to setting reasonable goals based to every player's ability [51]. Encouraging them to step out of their comfort zones, demanding high levels of performance and to embrace good change all in the heart of improvement.

The underlying theme is that vision - which provides meaning and direction for the team's efforts, serving as a beacon around all the sacrifice and hard work put into achieving success at the elite level [48]

In Summary

1. Albeit insufficient theoretical framework in areas specific to Elite Esports, Esports research is accelerating with its exponential growth, although it is important to look into the sampling methodologies of many studies till date that has implications towards the overgeneralization of Elite-level Esports where different mechanisms may be involved.

2. There is much pressure in Elite Esports which may lead to choking. It is important to acknowledge this to develop supportive frameworks through future research tailored to Esports contexts.

3. A pilot questionnaire revealed the poor player perspective on Coaching received specifically in the EU.

4. Resilience and Cohesion is complex, but important to maintaining Success.

5. To build resilience, one way is through Mental Fortitude Training, focusing on Personal Qualities, a Facilitative Environment, and a Challenge Mindset.

6. To build cohesion, one way is through bringing everyone together in order to achieve shared goals and objectives

7. Leadership is a mindset not a position, it is not confined to only the coaching or management staff, in fact, good leadership is shared and encourages open communication with a democratic-leadership style rather than an autocratic-leadership style.

8. Effective Leadership establishes good Vision, Support, and Challenge for the team.

Thank You for taking your time to read my blog! :)

Feel free to comment down below if any of my provided information helped you - regardless whether you are a player, coach, management, or any interested party that wanted to know just a little more about Sport Psychology and/or Esports.

If you wish to have the Full Reference List - Click here.

Best Regards, Calvin So

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvin-so-858382186/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/hevinix Email: hevinix2304@gmail.com

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