UW study points to burnout problems among esport players

According to a study by the University of Waterloo's engineering department which surveyed mainly e-sport coaches from professional League of Legends teams, some high-level players are burning out.

“We were trying to solve the problem of choking, which is when players don’t hit their full potential,” study lead, and Systems design engineering Ph.D. student Bader Sabtan said.

The study found one of the possible reasons for choking is a lack of standardized coaching approaches or techniques.

Also, many high-level players practice 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week.

Video game expert and Twitch Streamer Ajay Fry confirmed the reason some players put in so much time is because, “these games are updating every few weeks where these changes impact team compositions.”

Fry added that sometimes additional hours are needed because they are not so much “practising" but more so teaching themselves the new parts of the game.

Some games update as often as every two weeks.

Ontario Post-Secondary Esports League commissioner James Fitzgerald added that another contributor to burnout could be a lack of preparation.

“At the end of the day, these athletes don’t have the same training that your traditional sporting athlete would, and it leads to them not going through the proper warm-up, the proper stretching,” Fitzgerald said.

The most common physical stressors are related to posture and wrists.

“You see lots of e-sports athletes in their late teens or early 20’s that are already developing arthritis,” Fitzgerald added.

And when it comes to mental pressures, “esports players, unlike traditional sports, they are not used to going in public, playing in front of people,” Sabtan explained.

He added, “then suddenly you just put them in a stadium where there’s tens of thousands of people watching them, it’s a huge leap to adapt to.”

The popularity of e-sports is rising. So much so that the government of Ontario announced this year $1M over two years in post-secondary scholarships, after recognizing the impact on jobs.

Across the country in 2021, the gaming industry supported 55,000 full-time jobs.

Of all the regions Ontario is home to the most video game companies with 298.

Fry’s advice: “make sure you put your health front and centre. Playing the game is great, but you want to be able to play that game until you are old and gray.”

Sabtan believes one way to decrease stress and burnout amongst players, would be if the companies behind the largest games updated them less often.