Esports genre influences players kinematics behaviour – Antoine Dupuy.

Just a little reminder before delving into analyses and results, participants played 10 minutes of a game of their choice (League of Legends as a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena -MOBA-, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as a First Person Shooter -FPS-, and Minecraft as an Adventure genres) with tri-axial accelerometers located on their right upper limb (hand, forearm and arm). The main variable of interest to determine whether esports players of different esports genres would display unique kinematics behaviours that I will discuss in this article were: the average hand acceleration (how rapidly players are moving), the hand cumulative distance travelled (overall distance travelled while playing), and the hand area of displacement (represented by an ellipse gathering 95% of hand displacements).

Interestingly, we found that FPS players were moving more rapidly compared to MOBA players who were moving more rapidly than Adventure players. We observed the same results pattern concerning the hand travelled distance (FPS > MOBA > Adventure). While we found that Adventure and FPS players displayed a greater area of use on the mousepad in comparison to MOBA players.

These findings highlight physical demands variations while playing different esports genres which is translated by unique kinematics behaviours by players. This is interesting pieces of evidence for esports teams’ staff to customize physical conditioning based on the physical demand of a specific genre. These results can also provide indications to design future peripherals.

This article is just a quick overview of the findings. Feel free to contact me for more information.