Sleepless Nights: How Sleep Deprivation Affects Your Gaming Performance
Being sleep-deprived is known to cause performance decline across many domains. Many esports titles depend on fast decision-making, reaction time, etc. But does being sleep-deprived directly translate into worsened in-game performance? Here's the answer.
• Sleep deprivation is known to cause declines in performance, e.g., reaction time and decision-making.
• These are known to be important for in-game performance and may cause gaming performance to worsen.
• In tests, sleep-deprived participants showed a ~50ms worsened reaction time and lower levels of motivation and alertness.
• Game performance was not found to be impacted by sleep deprivation.
Being sleep-deprived is never a good thing, and there are concerns about how it may affect gaming performance. Studies have shown that esports athletes have a late sleep onset (01:30-05:00 am) and wake time (09:00-12:00 am) on average. One study has also shown that the mean sleep efficiency is only 67.7%.
Although esports athletes share some of the same sleep risk factors with traditional sports athletes (e.g., caffeine use, travel/jet lag, and pre-competition arousal/anxiety), there are esports-specific risk factors. For instance, evening or late-night competitions and physiologically arousing gameplay.
Some aspects of performance (e.g., visuospatial tasks, fast decision-making, response time, attention, and information processing) have been shown to decline when being sleep-deprived. However, does this translate into gaming performance?
"The purpose of the current study is to explore how a bout of acute sleep deprivation (~29 hours awake) affects the cognitive and in-game performance of esport players in the esport Rocket League." [1]
In total, 40 players joined the study as participants (all of them casual gamers). In accordance with their in-game MMR, they were paired and competed in 1v1 matches against each other. One of them was told to follow a sleep deprivation protocol, whereas the other was not.
In addition to some tests, in-game performance was measured: Shots Taken Difference, Time Spent Goalside of the Ball Difference, Saves Made Difference, Time Spent High in the Air Difference, and Demos Inflicted Difference.
😴 Don't Sleep While You Play
Sleep-deprived players had a ~50ms slower response and lapse time—this is almost five times more often. Also, the sleepy participants mentioned before playing that they felt sleepy, with lower levels of alertness and motivation.
"Despite these results, as well as the fact that participants felt that fatigue affected their in-game performance more following TSD [Total Sleep Deprived], we did not find evidence that TSD impacted match outcome in Rocket League matches." [1]
So, although their reaction times, motivation, and alertness were measurably worse, they did not play worse. The authors gave some potential reasons for this. First, "not all aspects of cognitive performance are equally affected by sleep loss" [1]. Maybe reaction time, at the participants' level, isn't that important. Playing, in contrast to very repetitive tasks, such as doing reaction time tests, may not suffer as badly from being sleep-deprived. Lastly, in Rocket League, there are breaks (e.g., 10 sec. after each goal) that may help the players to "rest" a bit, compared to doing tests.
🥡 The Takeaways
The most important takeaway is: always make sure you get enough sleep. Period. Your performance (across all the things you do throughout your day) and health will suffer (ok, maybe not Rocket League).
If you choose to play games when being sleep-deprived, maybe it's a good idea to choose a game that has quick rounds, such as Rocket League. Would CS2 also count? Maybe. But probably not LoL or DotA (unless you are the inter on the team and being dead gives you time to micro-rest).
Have a great weekend. Cheers,
Christian 🙂
