Adam Toth is the Program Research Manager of the LERO Esports Science Research Lab (ESRL), Europe's first esports-focused research facility. He’s been studying both recreational gamers and competitive esports athletes since 2018, helping research what makes professional players so good at what they do, while defining those skills. He is also an Associate Professor in Neuroscience and Biomechanics at the University of Limerick in Ireland since 2022.

Similar to working with any top athlete in any sport, I think the most rewarding part for me is seeing how the best do what they do. Observing their peak levels of performance. There's not a lot of variability in performances at the top level.

From a research standpoint, I think that's really exciting. Variability is something that we always try to control in our research when we're answering various research questions.

From a scientific perspective, it’s really exciting being involved with a high-performing population where we can make small testing changes that we don't think necessarily would matter, but seeing these expert individuals respond is fascinating.

There's a lot of debate around gaming, and esports in particular, whether or not competitive video gaming is a sport. I draw the line that sport really is competition. There are more physical sports with physical athletes and then there are less physical sports with more cognitive athletes.

I think that people might misconstrue it as though gamers are often sitting when they're playing games, there is a lot of physicality and a lot of movement, especially at the top levels. The speed and the control that they have of their movements, the precision, the accuracy – it’s really impressive.

Treating esports pros as cognitive athletes, forces us to look at them through a lens of performance, nutrition, biomechanics and neuroscience. As scientists, we should then leave no stone unturned when it comes exploring high-level gaming as a form of human performance.

To understand what matters to players’ performance, we need to study those at the top. We need to measure all of the little minute things that make a difference to pros and thus might also make a difference to amateurs. But logistical timelines are always at play: product cycles, research windows, player availability. Getting results quickly is really important.

With amateurs, there’s a lot more variability from one performance to the next. So in order to detect whether a particular intervention works – a change in their equipment or in their biomechanics or whatever – that’s a lot trickier when performances vary by a lot. When drawing conclusions, there's much more of an element of educated guesses at play.

Whereas with pros, because the performances are so consistent, when you make a change and you see that create a small change in their performance, you can be much more confident that whatever you're doing to impact their performance is actually having an impact. And then that can drive decisions around product design, training regimens, things like that.

Maybe ten years ago, back when I didn't know what an esport was, I remember trying out the software we developed for our first gaming performance tests, stuff like flicking and target tracking. I was a decent ice hockey athlete back in the day, so I thought I was fairly fast and reactive.

I did the flicking test and produced some score I thought must be good. Then we went to gaming events around the world and got pro players at the time to do the tests. They just absolutely blew me out of the water and I was sitting there thinking ‘I couldn't go any faster or be any more accurate and they're hitting these scores that for me just seemed unachievable.

That was really eye opening. To see these people who are at the top of their human performance endeavor absolutely killing it. You think that you're performing pretty well and they show you that there is a next level.