As a first-year PhD candidate for the University of Limerick and for the Esports Science Research Lab (ESRL), I had the pleasure to participate in a 4-days event at Gamescom Cologne 2023 accompanied by my ESRL colleagues, as well as Logitech Ireland and Lausanne. Gamescom Cologne is the largest event around gaming and esports gathering more than 300 000 in-person visitors.
During this event, my main objective was to recruit Gamescom attendees to take part in an esports biomechanics study in which participants played 10 minutes of a game of their choice (League of Legends as a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as a First Person Shooter, and Minecraft as an Adventure/Survival game) with tri-axial accelerometers placed on their right upper limb (hand, forearm and arm), and a customed Python script to track the cursor during the game (Special thanks to Gianpaolo Pedroni for the script).
This study aims to investigate the differences in the right upper limb movements (mouse side) while playing various esport genres. The idea and main outcome behind the study are the differentiation of esport genres by their typical movement patterns, constraints, and external workload. It was 4 full days of experimentation with no more than 30 minutes per participant.
At the end of the event, I was happy to have assessed 63 participants in total. The data will be analysed during the next few months and the preliminary results will be presented during the National Sport and Human Performance conference hosted by the Sport at Human Performance Research Centre at the University of Limerick (poster presentation).
Irrespective of how educational it has been from a research perspective; I was also delighted to share opinions with participants about the different research we are conducting with ESRL and in collaboration with Logitech. The participants appeared receptive to the different topics the ESRL is exploring which generate even more motivation for future research and investigations!
Antoine Dupuy is a PhD student in Esports Biomechanics, LERO Lab (ESRL), and Logitech, in the Physical Education & Sport Sciences Department in the University of Limerick.
Contact: antoine.dupuy@ul.ie ORCID @AntoineDupuy ResearchGate LinkedIn
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