{"id":12669,"date":"2025-07-22T07:39:42","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T07:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/?p=12669"},"modified":"2025-07-24T12:13:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T12:13:43","slug":"exclusive-interview-with-dr-ben-sharpe-part1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/exclusive-interview-with-dr-ben-sharpe-part1","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive Interview with Dr. Ben Sharpe – part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As esports continues its rapid ascent<\/a> into mainstream recognition, the unique mental demands placed on professional players remain largely unexplored. Dr. Ben Sharpe, a senior lecturer specializing in cognitive psychology, has been investigating these cognitive challenges through groundbreaking research. His findings reveal that esports athletes face “uniquely intense attentional demands that often exceed traditional sports,” requiring sustained focus for 30 to 90 minutes without meaningful breaks. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Sharpe explores the distinct psychological profiles required for different gaming titles and offers evidence-based strategies for managing the intense mental load of competitive play.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do mental demands of esports compare with traditional sports?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The field of study into esports so far that\u2019s specifically related to mental demands or the impact on cognition, whether that’s executive function or just attention, is relatively limited. But from my own research, esports athletes seem to face quite uniquely intense attentional demands that often exceed traditional sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While traditional athletes experience intermittent high-pressure moments, esports require multi-second precise actions making decisions consistently for about 30 to 90 minutes depending on the game without any kind of meaningful breaks. By meaningful I mean anything that would allow you to recover or recoup your senses and not feel the overwhelming burden of stress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own lab’s research has shown that there’s such an exceptional load, particularly on working memory and executive functions, the things that allow you to control your planning and reasonability. The dual challenge for esports<\/a> athletes is not only are they managing their own performance but there’s also some real-time information processing from multiple teammates. Sometimes they can hear the audience over their noise-canceling headphones too. The environment itself. It’s more akin to air traffic control, military surveillance and lifeguards where they’re constantly surveying an area for changes in an environment or a particular stimuli as opposed to traditional sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a traditional sport like soccer<\/a>, an elite player like Lionel Messi may be able to take some time out to walk around the pitch and survey the game or you may have defenders able to drop back into position or a team can rest in possession. That\u2019s not really possible if you’re playing a game like Starcraft 2<\/a> having to micromanage a whole range of activity across a map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there unique psychological demands for specific esports titles in your experience?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The short answer is yes, absolutely. There’s really distinct cognitive profiles across all the different titles and genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Counter-Strike<\/a> is exceptional for sustained vigilance, paying attention for long durations of time, requiring rapid threat detection, and responding to an enemy in a certain context, which engages the same kind of neural networks as a security surveillance context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MOBAs like League of Legends or Dota 2, they\u2019re more focused on complex strategic planning or dynamic attention allocation across multiple streams of information. So of course they can dot from different areas of the map and observe their play made simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Battle Royales, that’s quite a unique stress response because it’s elimination based format and variable match duration so it’s not predictable and really hard to train. Once you get eliminated from your game, there’s no returning to that particular context, so it\u2019s a unique stressor on the individuals that, again, because these titles are relatively new in terms of adoption and research, we don’t know too much about it. But we know from other esports titles that excessive high stress context can lead to mental ill health, depression, anxiety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fighting games, which are kind of on the cusp between a video game and esports depending on the tournament. They’re probably more akin to traditional sports in terms of they’re being directly focused on an opponent and not really anything else. But they’ve also got that added complexity<\/a> of frame perfect timing requirements and that kind of temporal precision and attention deployment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of those major titles, on face value, they may seem very similar, especially if you’re not used to those particular games or play styles or you’ve not engaged yourself. There’s definitely distinct cognitive profiles that are interesting and warrant future research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are there distinct psychological profiles or skill sets you can identify in traditional sports that might make a high-performing athlete a good fit for a particular esports title?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I guess there’s two ways of answering that. You have seen contexts where football professionals or American football professionals have transitioned into esports. Perhaps you could argue it’s less stress or maybe there’s more income they could take beyond their typical retirement stage or they’ve fallen into injury.  There seems to be transferable skills there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professional sports people can take the skills that they developed through hours and hours of practice playing their sport, especially where they may be a main voice within a football team to becoming the in-game leader in an esport context. That can mean taking control of the team, being able to communicate effectively and not crumble under high-pressure scenarios because they’re used to performing in situations, especially with substantial audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess the easiest way of drawing comparison probably are games like Counter-Strike where there are distinct roles within a team. Snipers or fraggers or in-game leaders and you could probably dot that about in similar contexts like you do in football, American football or rugby. There are certainly different cognitive demands but there’s certainly similarities in terms of specific roles. Rugby’s a really good example of that. You have flankers, for example, that might be more akin to a fragger within Counter-Strike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who does the short plays? Who’s more strategically playing at a certain pace? Who do you call for specific moments? Who are the main part of the team where, let’s say, if they were injured in the sporting context, it’s clear that the game would be in your favor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What strategies are key for managing and preventing burnout among esports players given the mental load placed upon them by competitive play?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I have to base it on my research or how others have applied my research to their practice because I’m not a practitioner. But of course my bias is I’m a cognitive scientist so a lot of my research recommendations or my labs research is focused on attention or working memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’d likely recommend some form of structured attention protocol here. Rather than working against it, you’re working with the kind of cognitive rhythms of requiring breaks and pauses with intensity. So like some form of a micro break technique between rounds allowing for attention and restoration without losing that competitive edge that some people find when they have excessive break periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likewise, I have some colleagues doing work with heart rate variability and breath control exercises. I can envisage that there’s going to be some kind of development around breath protocols specific to esports to regulate a player\u2019s autonomic nervous system during high pressure scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then from my own work into how physiological arousal affects human cognition and performance, you could probably introduce some form of progressive attention loading in practice, so gradually increasing the cognitive demands the same way you would when you’re preparing a national level competitor that’s about to join the professional stage. Instead of chucking them immediately into an audience of thousands and thousands, maybe get them to visualise an audience before you progress there, which of course could build resilience similar to physical conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I\u2019m biased by my own field but some form of practice, maybe call it attention switching, because esports athletes have to flick between different contexts, different scenarios, different information from the in-game leaders. You could probably introduce some form of cognitive transition training where you’re working on specific transferable skills rather than immediately throwing someone into a competitive environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s just based on my field of expertise but the field is growing so I’m hopeful there are going to be more explicit answers in the next year or so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What role does prioritisation play in the mental training for esports? If we’re looking at all these different approaches, is it about the meta structure of the programme at that point?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It’s super critical and often overlooked by esports teams I’ve been involved with, just as with physical training which varies in focus or intensity, cognitive training should follow the exact same principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So during off seasons, it could be building foundational attentional skills or addressing cognitive weaknesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pre-competition periods it would be emphasizing what I would call cognitive sharpness, almost working towards that periodisation point of peaking. The main fundamental issue a lot of esports athletes have is managing the stress response when there’s a certain context that you need to respond to. It could be the difference between clicking your mouse button correctly or incorrectly and you’re able to pay off your mortgage or pull yourself out of poverty. It’s quite dramatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During competition phases, like periodisation and physical training with traditional sports, I can imagine it would be more focused on maintenance or recovery protocols, which is also overlooked for the vast majority of esports, both titles and teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There just needs to be some variation. Periodising mental health with your performance, preventing stagnation and ensuring that neuroplasticity is essential for continued improvement rather than just leading directly to depression, anxiety, burnout, which you see unfortunately so often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking for more? Check the second part of the interview with Dr. Ben Sharpe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As esports continues its rapid ascent into mainstream recognition, the unique mental demands placed on professional players remain largely unexplored. Dr. Ben Sharpe, a senior lecturer specializing in cognitive psychology, has been investigating these cognitive challenges through groundbreaking research. His findings reveal that esports athletes face “uniquely intense attentional demands that often exceed traditional sports,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12669"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12729,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12669\/revisions\/12729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderpick.gl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}