Beyond Immersion: The Cognitive Mechanics of Functional Ludomusicology in Esports Performance

Abstract

In high-pressure esports, music is often treated as an immersion cue, yet converging evidence suggests it can also function as a cognitive ergogenic aid that modulates performance-relevant states through (i) arousal regulation, (ii) cognitive-load/attention allocation, and (iii) rhythmic entrainment. Quantitative syntheses from adjacent performance domains indicate that music produces small-to-moderate benefits in objective outcomes (e.g., a meta-analytic estimate of improved physical performance, g ≈ 0.31, and more positive affective valence, g ≈ 0.48). Evidence from sustained-attention paradigms further shows that listener-selected background music can yield measurable (albeit small) attentional gains, including faster reactions (≈ 7.8 ms improvement) and fewer false alarms (e.g., 0.660 vs. 0.710). Under mental-fatigue conditions, a recent systematic review reports that music can attenuate performance decrements—for example, reaction time increased in a no-music control condition (≈ 500 → 520 ms) but remained stable under music (≈ 502 → 498 ms) in a Go/NoGo task. However, benefits are boundary-conditioned: music with lyrics reliably impairs cognitive performance with small but credible effects (e.g., d ≈ −0.3 across memory/reading outcomes), whereas lyric-free instrumental music is often closer to null. Finally, because elite esports training and competition depend on rapid visuomotor execution, we highlight rhythmic entrainment as a plausible mechanism, while noting that tournament rules may restrict in-game music, shifting many applications to pre-/between-game windows. Together, this mini-review integrates quantitative evidence into a functional ludomusicology framework and outlines testable predictions for tailoring music by tempo, lyricality, rhythmic salience, and context (training vs. tournament).