What Esports Does To Your Mind

Esports are competitive games akin to chess. They are won through intelligent strategies, tactics, and teamwork. And they are primarily intellectual exercises that require you to constantly assess your situation, make good decisions, find solutions to problems, discover opportunities, and communicate with your team in order to synchronise your efforts.

The Main Cognitive Abilities

Cognitive abilities are mental operations that we always perform when we learn, communicate, strategize for success, or solve problems. They involve our memory, thinking, imagination, attention, and much more. And whenever we need and utilize them, they receive exercise.

Just like our muscles get the chance to work and develop during physical exercise, our mental muscles get trained and become stronger whenever we analyse a problem, learn something new, or devise a strategy for reaching a goal.

What Playing Esports Does To Your Mind

Esports matches are battles of wit. They force players to formulate goals, identify problems, and start making decisions right from the start. And this happens for 30 – 60 minutes, non-stop. Imagine what 60 minutes of non-stop exercise does to your physical muscles.

The same thing happens to your mind when you play something as complicated as a MOBA game like League of Legends or Dota 2. Or a real-time strategy game like StarCraft 2. The latter requires players to perform hundreds of actions per minute and make one decision after the other at a rapid pace. You constantly need to grow your economy, control your army, scout your opponent, defend yourself from his actions and go on the offensive, all at the same time.

MOBA games have close to one thousand elements that players need to fully assimilate before they can become good at them. The mental exercise involved in learning such a complicated system and operating with it does wonders to a person’s cognitive abilities.

Someone who has learned a challenging esport can naturally learn a lot of other things as well. The only limitation is their motivation. But the mental strategy of how it can be done has already been acquired by mastering just one competitive game.

Electronic sports are a simulator for learning, strategising, problem-solving, and decision-making. In many ways, they are no different from studying any other difficult discipline. The only difference is that they are very entertaining. This makes them appealing to large audiences. People who would otherwise rarely exercise certain intellectual muscles because they can’t stand mathematics or physics, get to do just that by playing esports.

Studies

In recent years, studies have been conducted about the way in which esports can develop your cognitive abilities. If you want to learn more about this topic, you can read this publication or this one. They both show some of the benefits of playing competitive video games.