Prof. Mark Campbell has been the Director of the LERO Esports Science Research Lab (ESRL) in Limerick, Ireland since 2016, where he is also a Professor of Sport & Performance Psychology at the University of Limerick. His particular interest in cognitive psychology, specifically on how the mind processes information and translates it into motor skill or motor skill learning, originally focused on closed motor skills in traditional sports such golf swings or place kicking in and rugby.

It’s probably just how much they care about their sport or their game genre, how passionate they are. I suppose gaming, and esports in particular, is a really nice natural lab to study psychology and neuroscience – looking at how players move and how they think.

LERO tests a variety of gamers year-round. Some high-level and pro gamers are really interested in improving, but you'll always have a percentage who aren't interested. They're just good at what they do and they don't really know why they're good. They don't want the sort of interference of someone observing and asking questions.

So what’s especially rewarding is engaging with people who are really interested in the research processes attached to it as well – that's what I'm really interested in as a researcher. But working with pros who really care about learning how they can improve themselves and how they interact with their hardware and software is definitely the most rewarding part.

Well, there’s a whole spectrum that we study. From “weekend warrior” gamers and what we call “naive gamers,” or people who don't game. We try to train them up on a certain task or target acquisition skill or something like that just to look at things like the rate of learning and how well they remember to see how effective a different training protocol might be.

To have a spectrum of skill and experience is really important to compare what pros do versus what really good amateurs do versus what good amateurs do versus weekend warriors do.I’m really interested in high-performance in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and thinking about how gamers and especially pros navigate digital environments as an mastery is fascinating.

A lot of tasks nowadays are really digitally oriented, not just office work but you look at surgery, air traffic control and such. These are highly-sought after, highly-professional skills and we find that gamers have a very high potential skill for these tasks when we look at the scientific literature on that.

From my point of view, ‘Designed with Pros’ isn’t about one-off, get pros in, test them, done. At LERO, we're really effectively engaging the athletes and seeking more insights than just a single testing occasion.

We measure and build on our understanding of what and how these athletes are so professionally good at, across different aspects of esports and human performance. The real treat is to synthesize that into big picture stuff to try and illuminate the whole scene about the science around it all.

By working so closely with athletes, we get to pick their brains about what we're testing, our approach and protocols, what’s engaging or disengaging and so on. Many established performance tests don't look particularly like games or are particularly interesting to do – so feedback from players helps us design better tests to get better results, which gives us better insights.

I think a lot about how much they train. The common perception, or maybe misperception, from non-gamers is that esports professionals are really sedentary. They don't do anything except sit there and just play games all day, they try to do the same things over and over and over again and just get better at the game.

I try to highlight in classes or to newcomers in the space that these guys aren’t incredibly simply because of how much time they put in, but from the types of training and practice they do. The training itself has evolved so much from when I first started 2011, even just a few years ago it was “scrim all day and then compete”

But today, there's a lot of real sports science behind what they're doing and that's a really interesting place for me. Because it's digital, I can show a class just how much training they do per week or just how many hours they've logged on a particular game. I love to highlight this big repository of skill execution and acquisition to sports science or psychology students to blow their minds.