Diagnosing Performance in Invasion-Based Esports: The Esports Performance Screening (EPS) Framework
2026-08-10 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer Interaction
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a new tool called the Esports Performance Screening (EPS) framework to help esports coaches better understand why players or teams make mistakes. Their framework breaks down gameplay into five connected levels—from overall strategy to individual actions—showing how problems can arise in different areas. It also helps coaches tell the difference between mental mistakes (like bad decisions) and physical slips (like poor execution). The EPS can be used both to review games after they happen and to analyze performance live during matches. Overall, the authors provide a clear, flexible system that coaches can use to improve how they diagnose and teach esports players.
esports coachingperformance analysismental errorsmotor executionstrategytacticsperformance breakdownreal-time screeninggameplay analysisinvasion-based games
Authors
Michael Trotter, Frauke Kubischta, Matthew Watson, Bastian Hougaard, Hendrik Knoche
Abstract
Coaching in esports continues to become more common, yet conceptual tools for coaches to analyse performance breakdowns in esports remain limited. Existing approaches lack a way to distinguish between mental errors (i.e., mistakes relate to strategy and tactics), and physical slips (i.e., motor execution). This paper introduces the Esports Performance Screening (EPS) framework, that integrates several frameworks and models from sport and computing science which can be used to analyse mental and motor performance in esports. The EPS framework organises performance into five interconnected levels: strategy, tactics, tasks, actions and operations. Across these levels, teams pursue forms of superiority that influence transitions between stability and instability during invasion-based esports competition. The framework supports two complementary modes of screening use: diagnostic during reflective review and real-time screening during live play. Through illustrative esports scenarios, we demonstrate how instability can originate at different hierarchical layers and how misattribution of failure can obscure underlying causes. The purpose of the EPS framework is to help coaches systematically diagnose performance breakdowns, and act as heuristics to aid gameplay analysis during a match. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded, title-agnostic esports framework to support systematic performance analysis and pedagogical development in invasion-based esports.