Esports and expertise: what competitive gaming can teach us about mastery

TL;DR

This paper explores how esports exemplifies mastery in human-computer interaction, emphasizing holistic skills over simple task completion times, and offers insights into high-level performance and expertise development.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of holistic mastery in esports, contrasting it with traditional HCI research focused on atomic tasks, and discusses implications for understanding expertise.

Findings

Esports demonstrates the significance of holistic skill mastery.

High-level performance involves optimizing complex, task-specific strategies.

Traditional metrics like task completion time are insufficient for measuring expertise.

Abstract

Historically, much research and development in human computer interaction has focused on atomic and generalizable tasks, where task completion time indicates productivity. However, the emergence of competitive games and esports reminds us of an alternative perspective on human performance in HCI: mastery of higher-level, holistic practices. Just as a world-renowned artist is rarely evaluated for their individual brush strokes, so skilled competitive gamers rarely succeed solely by completing individual mouse movements or keystrokes as quickly as possible. Instead, they optimize more task-specific skills, adeptly performing challenges deep in the learning curve for their game of choice.