Physiology on Esports, a League of Legends study

Esports gaming is an area in which videogame players need to cooperate and compete with each other, influencing their cognitive load, processing, stress, and as well as social skills. Here it is unknown to which extent traditional videogame play (with a desktop setting) can affect the physiological responses of players' autonomic nervous system. For such, we propose a study where we have measured distinct electrodermal and cardiac activity metrics over competitive players during several League of Legends gameplay sessions. We mainly found that game performance (whether winning or losing the game) significantly affects both EDA and ECG, where players who lost the game showed higher stress-related physiological responses, as compared to winning players. We also found that important specific in-game events such as "Killing", "Dying" or "Destroying Turret" significantly increased both electrodermal and cardiac activity over players more than other less-relevant events such as "Placing Wards" or "Destroying Turret Plates". Finally, by analyzing activity on player roles we found different trends of activity on these measurements, that may foster the exploration of esports gaming effects on human physiology in future studies.