Beyond immersion: the cognitive mechanics of functional ludomusicology in esports performance

TL;DR

This paper explores how music can improve esports performance by regulating arousal, attention, and rhythm, beyond just creating immersion.

Contribution

It introduces a functional ludomusicology framework that integrates quantitative evidence and proposes testable predictions for music use in esports.

Findings

Listener-selected background music can improve attention with faster reactions and fewer false alarms.

Music with lyrics impairs cognitive performance, while instrumental music has neutral or positive effects.

Rhythmic entrainment is proposed as a key mechanism for music's impact on visuomotor execution in esports.

Abstract

In high-pressure esports, music is often treated as an immersion cue, yet converging evidence suggests it can also function as a cognitive ergogenic aid that modulates performance-relevant states through (i) arousal regulation, (ii) cognitive-load/attention allocation, and (iii) rhythmic entrainment. Quantitative syntheses from adjacent performance domains indicate that music produces small-to-moderate benefits in objective outcomes (e.g., a meta-analytic estimate of improved physical performance, g ≈ 0.31, and more positive affective valence, g ≈ 0.48). Evidence from sustained-attention paradigms further shows that listener-selected background music can yield measurable (albeit small) attentional gains, including faster reactions (≈7.8 ms improvement) and fewer false alarms (e.g., 0.660 vs. 0.710). Under mental-fatigue conditions, a recent systematic review reports that music can attenuate performance decrements—for example, reaction time increased in a no-music control condition (≈500 → 520 ms) but remained stable under music (≈502 → 498 ms) in a Go/NoGo task. However, benefits are boundary-conditioned: music with lyrics reliably impairs cognitive performance with small but credible effects (e.g., d ≈ −0.3 across memory/reading outcomes), whereas lyric-free instrumental music is often closer to null. Finally, because elite esports training and competition depend on rapid visuomotor execution, we highlight rhythmic entrainment as a plausible mechanism, while noting that tournament rules may restrict in-game music, shifting many applications to pre−/between-game windows. Together, this mini-review integrates quantitative evidence into a functional ludomusicology framework and outlines testable predictions for tailoring music by tempo, lyricality, rhythmic salience, and context (training vs. tournament).

Figures