The eSport Phenomenon
E-sports has experienced an incredible rise and change in recent years. The professionalization of the sport also has to do with the immensely increased prize money and the extraordinary advertising potential.
Formats such as CS:GO, DOTA 2, League of Legends, StarCraft II, FIFA and Call of Duty are the most renowned among a multitude of electronically operated competitions.
Despite the constant professionalization, sports science research, and thus also sports psychology research, is still in its infancy to some extent. Other sports that have been practiced for over a hundred years, tons of training methods have already been successfully integrated from science into practice.
A brief history of eSports
First gaming Event in Stanford "Spaceover"
Space Invaders had a big influence on the gaming industry.
Tim Berners-Lee made the foundations for todays eSport
Spiele: Mario Bros. | Rad Race | Tetris
price pool: 10.000$
The eSport organisation CPL and the professionell games league AMD gave eSports a new face.
The science fiction game Starcraft had a hight online popularity.
The company electronic sports league funks nowadays as a organizer of eSport events.
Compared with price pools nowadays... pocket money.
Already in 2013 Twitch had round about 45 million viewers per month.
The league of legends season 2 had a price pool of 1.000.000$ and 800.000 viewers.
For 970 million USD Amazon aquired the streaming platform Twitch.
Together with 8 eSport Teams the ESL founded the World eSport Association.
Valve offered a 24,6$ million price pool for the Dota 2 competition in 2017.
The top 5 e-sport games have been watched 1.200.000.000 hours world wide
eSports generated more than 1.000.000.000$ in annual revenues.
Oles work in eSport
However, some techniques have already proven their worth: In practical sports psychology work, particular emphasis is placed on resilience. The claim to be on top of your emotions and to take advantage of them is not exclusive to e-sports, but emotion control in gaming is often the deciding factor when it comes to winning.
Maintaining Focus is another important factor for performance in e-sports. The skills to align your focal point on the task at hand and to block out external influences make all the difference. Understanding how players process information and teaching them about external and internal attentional control are as important as recognizing attention problems.
The holistic approach to gamers and their everyday life and the various stressors is immensely important for the needs analysis and the resulting interventions. Thus, in addition to the training of mechanical skills (in which the performance density in e-sports is almost incomparably high) and game sense, it is also crucial to support factors such as nutrition, fitness, sleep, regeneration, and balancing between training/competition and one’s own life. As a special service, cognitive training and eye tracking are part of Ole’s portfolio.
In his work with professional players, Ole is committed to this holistic approach and therefore supports his teams comprehensively with his expertise in sports science and sports psychology.