Diagnosing Performance in Invasion-Based Esports: The Esports Performance Screening (EPS) Framework

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.