Discoveries in science have revealed that eSports can help you substantially improve your brain health.
Joseph Márquez’s hands go at flash speed. His right thumb slides from one button to another, his left thumb moves between angles mere degrees apart on a circumference the size of a quarter. He’s just seconds away from his Super Smash Bros. Melee competition against 25-year-old Justin McGrath, and this isn’t going well.
Marquez, 27, performs 325 actions per minute, or five innings per second. That requires processing visual information on screen, reacting, contemplating, strategizing, and executing, all in milliseconds. His fingers hit the buttons, unleashing a series of movements. But it’s not enough. Marquez, the oldest star left in the Evo 2018 melee tournament last August, falls and slides towards the group of losers.
He does not stop at that. “I try not to think when I’m playing,” says Marquez, known as Mang0. And that strategy has worked for him for a decade. He is a star for Team Cloud9, a top $ 700 million team in the world, known as eSports. Márquez entered his first tournament in 2007, won his first national crown a year later, and is among the best since then.
But he plays a sport whose players have a short lifespan. Traditional sports stress the mind and body, but eSports are primarily mental. They challenge your brain, especially your knowledge centers, object perception centers, and learning and processing engines. The reaction time and efficiency of these systems begin to decrease naturally in the mid-20s, which may be the reason why people dominate sports from the age of 20. That means Marquez may be about to end the game literally. Last year, he finished sixth in his career in the Melé world ranking.
Márquez says that “he will play as long as my hands allow it”, but to do so he will have to reduce the process of cognitive aging. Emerging science offers hope. With proper training, Marquez and anyone with a PlayStation could preserve, or level up, their brain prowess.
THE BRAIN RESPONDS TO AGE AND AGES QUICKLY
At the age of 24, that’s when your brain’s reaction times start to decrease, according to research from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Scientists analyzed the reaction time data of 3,305 players between the ages of 16 and 44, observing their reactions when they play StarCraft II, a game that allows you to make many decisions in real time.
The researchers obtained a “see and do” latency, how quickly players could detect something unique on the screen and react. A 39-year-old is about 150 milliseconds slower than a 24-year-old with similar skills. That’s up to 30 seconds of reaction time lost every 15 minutes.
One possible chemical reason for this decline: N-acetylaspartate (NAA), the second most concentrated amino acid in the central nervous system, begins to decline. Among the supposed functions of NAA is the contribution acetate for myelin sheaths, which isolate nerve cells and increase the speed and efficiency with which information travels throughout the brain. This, combined with the contraction of the frontal lobe and the hippocampus that drive memory, begins the erosion of its ability to store and retrieve information.
ESports can offer a solution for many. Different video games seem to stimulate different parts of the brain. That means your Xbox can provide brain “training”, if used correctly. But just as your body cannot thrive in its physical state 24/7, your brain needs the correct dose of game, it is decided that you should not only play Call of Duty 24 hours a day.
Fighting games, like Super Smash Bros. and Street Fighter, challenge you to speed up your thinking process. Open-world games like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto could prevent age-related volume loss in the hippocampus. The science of eSports is in its infancy, so researchers and gamers alike are searching (and disagreeing) for the right combination.
Marquez does not appear to be interested in the investigation. Many eSports teams believe that more practice is better. Marquez is always getting ready and he does it with: Super Smash Bros Melee, a Nintendo GameCube game in the era that also airs online, on and off, all day. He’s not changing. “Maybe my reactions are a little bit slower,” he says. “But put me in a certain situation in the game and I can react to something that no one else can.” “His experience may offset biological decline, but he may not be optimizing his brain performance,” says Mark Campbell, who runs the three-year Lero eSports Scientific Research Laboratory at the University of Limerick in Ireland.
Campbell believes that e-athletes can withdraw from the game sooner because they burn out, worn out by relentless (and one-dimensional) hours of training. He recommends that players focus on efficiency rather than volume, using intermittent training. In general, people can maintain intense concentration for 15 minutes, he says, so e-athletes should break their “training” down into smaller, more intensive blocks, rather than just playing nonstop. Think 15 minutes working on control skills, then 15 minutes strategizing in the heat of the action, then 15 minutes of play. “The idea is to train with a little purpose,” he says.
THE BEST GAMES FOR YOUR BRAIN
This is worth keeping in mind for everything from your sports preparation to your personal efforts at mental improvement, and it fits in with what neuroscience has taught us about learning in general. Along with focused training, variety can be critical. Different games deliver different cognitive advantages. Marquez, for example, loses the hippocampus benefits that come with real-world games.
Such games can be successful by pushing you to explore 3D game worlds. One of the first video games to do so was Super Mario 64, a 1996 Nintendo 64 game and the subject of a 2014 German study. The researchers had adults play it for at least half an hour a day for two months. They saw increases in brain volume in the regions responsible for spatial processing, memory, strategic planning, and motor skills.
But why? Craig Stark, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California at Irvine, who studies how video games affect the mind, may have the answer: the “environmental enrichment effect,” which has been observed in mice. If you place a mouse in a room with toys and places to explore, “wonderful things happen in their ability to learn new information,” he says.
“Types of immersive 3-D games,” says Stark, make your mouse the shining example of sports is open weight in the world of League of Legends. “You have to remember where you are going, where your resources are and then keep all that information,” says Stark. “The people who make League of Legends keep their hippocampi in good shape.” Our brains are connected to learn and retain new information, so you can use environmental enrichment to perfect yours. “Browse everywhere and come home without that nice little GPS,” says Stark.
PLAYING VIDEO GAMES HELPS YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
More physical sports athletes are also embracing the simulated exploration offered by eSports. The athletes from the NFL and the NBA use NeuroTracker, a virtual game real style that allows them to track multiple targets in a 3D space. Virtual performance has been predictive of sports performance statistics throughout the season.
The military is also making use of virtual reality combat and flight simulators. NASA uses VR simulations to train for rescues and practice spacewalk procedures. And changing the script, player Jann Mardenborough recently went from being a Gran Turismo 5 champion in 2011 to being a driver on a true motorsports team. (Yes really.)
The boom in sports and eSports research generates more attention for Márquez, who meets his main rival, Adam “Armada” Lindgren, in that stretch of losers. Lindgren, 25, beat older adults in 2017. In Evo 2018, Marquez and his favorite character, Falco, lose to Lindgren. More age-related losses? Marquez is challenging. “I really don’t think age matters much,” he says. But Lindgren is very tired. Weeks later, on YouTube, he announces that he is withdrawing from the Smash singles. However, Márquez, the Atari of his trade, is not going anywhere. “You can even get smarter as you get older,” he says. If you play the right games.