B A Start

Level up to greater brain longevity and mental agility by learning from the youngest sport of them all – esports.

- Imad Khan

JOSEPH MARQUEZ’S HANDS are a blur. His right thumb slides from button to button, his left thumb shifting between angles mere degrees apart on a circumference the size of a 50c piece. He’s just seconds into his Super Smash Bros. Melee contest against Justin McGrath, 25 – and this is not going well.

Marquez, 27, is performing 325 actions per minute, or five inputs every second. That requires processing visual information onscreen, reacting, contemplating, strategising, and executing– all within milliseconds. His fingers slam buttons, unleashing a flurry of moves. But it’s not enough. Marquez, the oldest star left in last August’s Evo 2018 Melee tourney, falls, slipping into the losers bracket.

He doesn’t dwell on that. “I try not to think when I’m playing,” says Marquez, known as Mang0. And that strategy has worked for a decade. He is a star for Team Cloud9, a top squad in the R10 billion world of competitive gaming, better known as esports. Marquez entered his first tournament in 2007, won his first national crown a year later, and has been among the best ever since.

But he plays a sport whose players have a short shelf life. Traditional sports stress mind and body, but esports are mostly mental. They challenge your brain, especially its knowledge centres, object- perception hubs, and learning and processing engines. The reaction time and efficiency of these systems begin to diminish naturally in your mid-20s, which may be why esports are dominated by people in their early 20s. That means that Marquez may be nearing game over. Last year, he finished a career-low sixth in the world Melee rankings.