It’s a fact: competitive video game professionals retire earlier on average than their basketball or football counterparts. It has become common to see champions of various disciplines − first-person shooters (or “FPS”), strategy or combat games − make way for the next generation after celebrating their 26e or 27e anniversary.
As explained The Washington Post, it is customary to say that the physical capacities of an e-athlete decline in their mid-twenties: “Reflexes, coordination between hands and eyes and intellectual alertness” would be decreasing.
“However, these widely repeated arguments do not seem to have any medical basis.”, warns the journalist, who quotes the words of a physiotherapist specializing in the training of e-sports. The latter concedes that the loss of reflexes with age is a known phenomenon, but that it occurs well after the milestone of a quarter of a century. The American daily, which spoke with five young retirees from e-sport, is therefore exploring other avenues to explain these early retirements.
Intensive workouts
“The main reasons that encourage them to withdraw are stress, overwork, job insecurity and the desire to discover other things.”, note the title. Thus, Johnathan Wendel, better known by his pseudonym “Fatal1ty”, former champion of several shooting games (including Quake) who “hung up mouse and keyboard” at 26: he invokes the drop in tournament winnings and explains that he has found better ways to make his experience in the field of video games profitable, in particular creating his brand of gaming accessories.
“Thresh” (real name Dennis Fong), retired from video games at 20, also shares his desire to devote himself to his businesses. “Now 44, Thresh has remained a competitor at heart – and convinced that he could rank among the top 100 players in any game if he put the time into it. But as a family man and business executive, he prefers to play more for fun.” If the interested party explains that it is possible to devote oneself fully to video games during the twenties, the task becomes more delicate when one plans to start a family and run a business.
It turns out that the esports environment is highly demanding. “Seagull” (Brandon Larned) describes the intensive training he had to undergo during his professional period: ten hours a day, six days a week, with the other members of his team. For him, as for many players questioned by the Washington Post, the experience turns to burn-out, physical and mental exhaustion. Seagull now exercises its talents on the Twitch platform – the emergence of video streaming offering new sources of income often more profitable than the competition. “There is a lot of burn-out in esports because of ultra-intensive training”, explains Larned, who notes that “People don’t see professional video game practice as a real job’.”
“It becomes an easy excuse to justify endless hours of practice.”
“Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”
Raising concern, this overwork seems to have become the norm in the world of ultra-competitive esports, explains the Washington Post. Keeping up with the pace of training is a condition sine qua non joining a professional team. Young talents have generally already accumulated many hours of play and are considered seasoned players from the age of 17.
This state of affairs also leads the best players, anxious to keep their title, to devote ever more hours to training. The title describes a cycle where fatigue leads “to the acceleration of the aging of professional players and their increasingly early retirement, replaced by younger players”.
Some doctors also point to a determining psychological factor: the received idea that a decline in physical abilities with age acts as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” : Professional players approaching 25 years put the slightest underperformance on the account of their aging, concluding that they will never be competitive again.
The title, however, points out that there is no shortage of counter-examples. 36-year-old fighting game player “Tokido” (Hajime Taniguchi), a legend of Street Fighters, explains feeling in the best shape of his career. For “Rambo” (Ronald Kim), a gamer and entrepreneur providing tailored training to other gamers, the experience gained over the years plays an equally important role within a team.