Psychological Factors That Drive Your In-Game Performance
Hand-eye coordination, reaction time, and personality traits are all known aspects that improve gaming performance. Psychological factors, on the other hand, are less well explored in gaming. Thirty-five esports experts explain the most important ones. Cheers to the last episode of 2025.
• Psychological factors and their link to in-game performance are less well explored.
• Thirty esports athletes, four coaches, and one team owner were interviewed and named the most important aspects.
• Resilience was named the most important factor, followed by adaptability, cooperativeness, and goal-orientedness.
• Interestingly, creative thinking and problem-solving abilities were considered the least important.
• Some players quit their esports careers early because they get sidetracked.
Each and every frequent reader of this newsletter is probably aware of the fact that playing video games has been shown to improve hand-eye coordination, motor skills, visual abilities, etc. All of these are important aspects when it comes to performing well in-game. In addition, personal characteristics such as age, personality traits, and communication skills are also important.
Although there has been a great amount of research, there are still unknowns. One area that hasn't received much attention is psychological factors and how they may be linked to performance.
When diving into a new topic, what do you do? Right, you ask the people who may know more about it than you do. In this sense, the researchers interviewed 30 esports athletes, four coaches, and one team owner.
🕵️ Beyond Your Typical Suspects
The majority of psychological factors named relate to resilience and the player's capacity to stay focused (attention). During the interviews, the participants also named some of the already known aspects related to performance: reaction time, hand-eye coordination, cooperation, adaptability, and goal-orientedness. Interestingly, the aspects that were mentioned the least were critical thinking and creative problem-solving. This is interesting because these are typically what every boss in a "traditional" company would like to see.
Another interesting fact that I hadn't really heard before is that many young players get sidetracked and, as a result, never make it. One of the interviewees said:
"One example is that my friend... who everyone was amazed at what a genius he was, but he disappeared from the game... At least I feel like it’s easy for people to get sidetracked like it would be cool to play that Indie game or something. We have seen specific examples of young talents really disappearing from the surface and it may be simply because they have not consciously managed certain attitudes or even if they should have been made aware of things that are not game-specific and which can help a lot in their development otherwise.” [1]
It makes sense, though. In today's society, temptations are everywhere, and video games are no exception. They are designed to capture and hold your attention for as long as possible. When a new game comes out and is "hyped," everyone rushes to play it. Other games such as LoL, Dota 2, CS2, and the like are made to be addictive. It's easy to see how many players can fall into the trap of trying out a new game here, testing a patch of their third favorite game, instead of sticking to one title.
What's surprising to me too is the fact that Resilience hasn't received much attention in esports. Although there are some papers out there, our knowledge is quite limited. However, resilience will probably pop up once we the scientific community has, somewhat, of an idea how gaming is linked to mental health aspects such as burnout.
I hope you all had a great Christmas. Read each and everyone of you in 2026.
Christian 🙂
