by Jessica-Kim Danh, Coordinated Program in Nutrition
It’s 2020, and by this point, you’ve likely heard the term eSports thrown around quite a bit. But in case you’ve been living under a rock, eSports is a competition that is centered around video games and it’s quite popular. In fact, according to Business Insider, eSports viewership is expected to grow from 454 million in 2019 to 646 million by 2023 and surpass $1 billion in revenue this year. With so many video game enthusiasts and those aspiring to become professional video gamers themselves, it’s no surprise that research is diving into ways to enhance gaming performance.
A recent study published in Nutrients looked at the potential benefits of a nutritional supplement for video gamers. This supplement is a new inositol enhanced arginine silicate. What does that mean? Let’s break it down: inositol is basically a sugar that you can find in abundance in the brain and it helps with sending signals; L-arginine helps make nitric oxidewhich increases blood flow; and silicon (for the silicate part) allows your body to take in more L-arginine and can potentially improve cognitive function. This recipe of a supplement may do wonders for gamers because playing video games requires high levels of cognitive flexibility. This is the ability to focus your attention and anticipate the opponents’ next moves all while being able to switch tasks with rapid reaction timing.
For this reason, the researchers focused their efforts on looking at the effects of this supplement on three main outcomes for video gamers: cognitive function, mood, and performance. Fifty-five participants were randomly split into a supplement or a placebo group and took their respective doses every day for seven days. On Days 1 and 7 of the study, the participants took multiple tests before and after playing their video game of choice to measure for the main outcomes. For the days between, participants played video games as normal.
Cognitive Function
The researchers used three tests to measure cognitive function: Trail Making Test (TMT) Part A, TMT Part B, and the Stroop Test. TMT Part A tests your visual search and motor speed skills by making you link a series of 25 numbers in order. Part B gets trickier and tests your mental flexibility by adding the alphabet into the mix so that you must link both the numbers and letters in order as well as alternate between them. The Stroop Test measures your selective attention, response, and reaction time by having you read aloud the color of a word that appears rather than what the word says. You may be familiar with it already, but if not, you can try it here.
So, what did they learn? Participants taking the supplement outperformed the placebo group in the TMT Part A, but had similar, improved results in the TMT Part B. In other words, visual search and motor speed skills improved more in the supplement group, but both groups improved similarly in mental flexibility. They did find, however, that those taking the supplement made fewer errors in both the TMT Part B and the Stroop Test.
Mood
Positive mental attitude, or PMA, is important in competitive gaming and has even been turned into a meme. The researchers used a questionnaire called the Profile of Mood States (POMS) before and after dosing on Day 1 and 7 to measure different aspects of mood like vigor-activity and anger-hostility. These aspects were totaled into a score called total mood disturbance (TMD). In this case, you don’t want a high score because that means you have a higher degree of moodiness. After one week of the study, the supplement group showed improvement in their TMD scores and even reported having less anger. This is good news, especially if you’re familiar with the notorious “rage quit,” i.e. quitting the game out of anger.
Performance
The participants chose a video game they played often to measure their performance. They gave the researchers a screenshot of their current scores on Day 1 and then another screenshot of their updated scores on Day 7. Both groups improved their scores but neither group showed an advantage over the other.
Should I take this supplement to be a Pro Gamer?
While the researchers suggest that their data support the use of the supplement to improve gaming performance, they didn’t control for outside stressors that could affect the results, e.g. work hours or diet. There also seems to be some controversy in using the Stroop Test to measure cognitive function in gamers. This supplement could be promising, but we should see more experiments first. So, if video games suddenly interest you and you’re looking for a quick way to “get good,” you’ll be better off grinding your way to glory for now; that is, put in the time and work.