Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Video games represent a complex, engaging task domain that has shown great promise as an experimental paradigm for the study of cognition and skill acquisition. The methods that have thus far been used to study video games, however, have been sub-optimal, and will likely become more outdated as the video gaming landscape continues to change. In this work, I first give a brief overview of the previous literature surrounding video games and cognition. I next address the critical methodological problems such as measuring expertise based solely through time-on-task as a heuristic of expertise rather than true metrics of skilled performance itself. I then suggest how the burgeoning sub-domain of competitive video gaming, or “eSports,” provides an elegant solution to these problems. Finally, I discuss the current and future directions of eSports cognition research.