Becoming a Healthy Player: Exploring Teen Esports Players’ Perspectives on Mental Well-Being through Participatory Design

Paper Title

Becoming a Healthy Player: Exploring Teen Esports Players’ Perspectives on Mental Well-Being through Participatory Design

Publication Info

• Topic area: Mental well-being in teenage esports players through participatory design.
• Keywords: esports, mental well-being, teenagers, participatory design, toxicity, tilt, cognitive behavioral theory, resilience, coping strategies, team dynamics.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing mental well-being initiatives in esports are adult-centric and fail to address the lived realities and developmental needs of teenage players. These programs often overlook the social and emotional ecosystem of play, focusing instead on managing risks or symptoms.
• Significance: With esports becoming a central part of youth culture, understanding and supporting mental well-being in teenage players is critical for their emotional health, social development, and ability to thrive in competitive gaming environments.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has highlighted stressors such as toxicity, performance pressure, and sleep disruption in esports, but it has largely focused on risks like addiction or problematic use. Positive dimensions like resilience and belonging remain underexplored, especially from the perspective of adolescents. This study addresses this gap by centering youth voices through participatory design.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A participatory design (PD) methodology to explore teenage esports players’ perspectives on mental well-being, focusing on their definitions of a “healthy player,” stressors, and coping strategies.
• Novelty:
  1. Demonstrates the value of participatory design in surfacing nuanced insights and empowering youth agency.
  2. Provides actionable guidance for coaches and educators on creating culturally relevant interventions grounded in teens’ lived experiences.
  3. Examines overlooked dimensions of mental well-being, such as emotional resilience, peer dynamics, and community belonging, through the lens of teenage players.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted nine online participatory design sessions with 34 participants, including 17 teenage players, 7 collegiate coaches, 5 program coordinators, and 5 researchers.
  • Activities included drawing, affinity diagramming, comic storyboarding, and video reflections to explore wellness models, stressors, and coping strategies.
  • Data was analyzed through thematic coding and triangulation to identify patterns in teens’ mental well-being perceptions and practices.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Teens define mental well-being as a collective and relational practice, emphasizing teamwork, social responsibility, and emotional regulation.
  • Key stressors include toxicity, tilt, performance pressure, sleep disruption, and relational conflict.
  • Coping strategies are primarily self-directed, focusing on immediate, practical actions like taking breaks, reframing losses, and adjusting environments.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Highlights gaps in current adult-centric interventions, which often fail to resonate with teens’ lived experiences.
  • Provides a youth-driven perspective that emphasizes relational and systemic factors over individual self-regulation.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted in-depth participatory design sessions with iterative activities to explore mental well-being concepts.
  • Data collection included video recordings, field notes, and design artifacts, analyzed through thematic coding.
  • Participants’ insights were synthesized into actionable themes and strategies for mental well-being.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited diversity in the sample, with predominantly male participants.
  • Conducted entirely online during COVID-19, potentially missing in-person dynamics.
  • Small-scale and exploratory; future research should include larger, more diverse samples and examine hybrid or in-person esports contexts.

Summary

This study explores teenage esports players’ perspectives on mental well-being using participatory design. Teens define well-being as a collective practice rooted in teamwork, social responsibility, and emotional regulation, while stressors include toxicity, tilt, and systemic pressures. Coping strategies are practical and immediate, favoring micro-interventions like taking breaks and reframing losses over formal programs. The findings align with Cognitive Behavioral Theory, highlighting cycles of cognition, emotion, and behavior in resilience. This work underscores the need for youth-centered, context-sensitive interventions that integrate seamlessly into esports environments, fostering both individual and collective well-being.