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Electronic Sport (esport) is a widespread and increasingly growing economic, cultural, and scientific phenomenon. With an audience up to 495 million (Newzoo, 2020) and an expanding player base of both casual and professional players, the competition for immense prize pools on the top level is getting more and more intense. The competition in esports takes place on different levels. Amateurs on the lowest level compete in tournaments for fun and without any monetary motivation, while professional players earn a relevant amount of income by playing, either alone or in teams. The main distinction between amateurs and professionals in esport is not clearly or officially defined, mostly it is based on the presence of relevant income (Lipovaya et al., 2018) earned by competition in tournaments. This classification is applied identically in many traditional sports, such as soccer or tennis, where players are defined as professionals if they are above a certain income limit or play in a certain division. The practice of sport (or esport) of professionals is therefore their profession. The current route to excellence in esport is still unclear (Pedraza-Ramirez et al., 2020), there are no developmental stages defined and no real career plans are established (Abbot & Collins, 2004). Currently only some thousand players can be accounted as professional in the esport context (Nielsen & Karhulahti 2017). Players compete in diverse fields including, real time strategy games, e.g., StarCraft II (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010). or Age of Empires III (Ensemble Studious, 2005), multiplayer online battle arena games, e.g., Defence of the Ancients 2 (Valve Corporation, 2013) or League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) or first-person shooters, e.g., Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2019) or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve Corporation, 2012). Other competitive games and simulations are based on traditional sports such as soccer, e.g., FIFA 19 = Fédération Internationale de Football Association (EA Vancouver, 2018) or PES 20 = Pro Evolution Soccer (PES Productions, 2019) or racing, e.g., Gran Turismo Sport (Polyphony Digital, 2017) or Forza Motorsport 4 (Turn 10 Studios, 2011) (Bányai et al., 2019; Taylor, 2011).
All kinds of esport games require the player to react as fast as possible to versatile, primarily visual stimuli, to make quick as well as correct decisions in complex situations, and to inhibit unnecessary information along the way (Kowal et al., 2018). This is in line with the thoughts of Happonen and Minashkina (2019) as well as Himmelstein et al. (2017), who propose that quick decision-making, along with other mental factors, might be important to achieve victory. Accurate perception and tracking of movement are fundamental. For instance, players need to track their own moving avatar in League of Legends while simultaneously paying attention to the changing positions of multiple enemies and allies. Another example is the football simulation FIFA. Similar to real-world football, players need to keep focus on the ball-carrying avatar, opponents, and possible support avatars of their own team. This is particularly difficult, because all of these related possible focus points are in motion. This puts high demands on perceptual processing and central and peripheral attentional skills (Bavelier et al., 2011; Torner et al., 2019).