Detecting Video Game Player Burnout With the Use of Sensor Data and Machine Learning

Abstract

Current research in eSports lacks the tools for proper game practising and performance analytics. The majority of prior work relied only on in-game data for advising the players on how to perform better. However, in-game mechanics and trends are frequently changed by new patches limiting the lifespan of the models trained exclusively on the in-game logs. In this article, we propose the methods based on the sensor data analysis for predicting whether a player will win the future encounter. The sensor data were collected from ten participants in 22 matches in the League of Legends video game. We have trained machine learning models, including the transformer and gated recurrent unit, to predict whether the player wins the encounter taking place after some fixed time in the future. For 10-s forecasting horizon, the transformer neural network architecture achieves the ROC AUC score of 0.706. This model is further developed into the detector capable of predicting that a player will lose the encounter occurring in 10 s in 88.3% of cases with 73.5% accuracy. This might be used as a players’ burnout or fatigue detector, advising players to retreat. We have also investigated which physiological features affect the chance to win or lose the next in-game encounter.