The effect of stress exposure training on player performance in League of Legends games

Presented by: Bader Sabtan (PhD candidate) 

League of Legends (LOL) is the most popular, viewed game in Esports, peaking at 4.1 million concurrent viewers and 664,100,000 hours watched in 2021. A constant problem in Esports is that players do not perform to their expected potential when under stress (also known as choking). In the literature, training under stress is a well-known choking intervention that has worked in other domains (e.g., traditional sports and the military). When applied to Esports, this technique is used to attempt to familiarize a person with the stressful conditions they will encounter during a big-stage competition by training them under conditions that have distractors and stressors similar to those present in the stage environment. However, the existing literature does not provide enough information to determine the stressors and distractors causing choking in Esports, nor does it provide a suitable activity and performance indicator to test an intervention. In this study, an experiment was designed to test a tailored intervention on an experiment group (who trained under stress) and compare its effectiveness with the method the coaches suggested for the control group (who trained without stress) over a period of five days. The findings showed that training Esports players’ mechanical skills without stress may improve their performance under stress by a small amount, but also, and in comparison, training under stress improved the experiment group’s performance under actual game stress by more than five times relative to the control group. Moreover, the participants in the experiment group initially showed signs of burnout as their performance declined on Day 2, but then they recovered on Day 3 onwards; this pattern suggests that such training requires time to show its benefits.