Tilt

Tilt describes a temporary breakdown in self-regulation following a frustrating or costly outcome, in which a player's subsequent decisions become measurably worse than their own baseline. The term originates in poker but is now standard vocabulary across competitive gaming. The mechanism most consistently implicated is depletion of self-regulatory resources: Baumeister and colleagues (1998) showed that exerting effortful self-control on one task measurably degrades self-control on an unrelated task performed shortly after, a pattern that maps directly onto a disciplined player who loses a close exchange and immediately over-commits on the next one.

Reference: Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven & Tice, 1998. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. Chasing a kill into a bad position immediately after dying to a lucky shot in a CS2 or Valorant round.
2. Over-extending a lane after losing a close trade in League of Legends, when the correct play is to reset and farm.
3. Forcing a fight to reclaim map control right after a costly team wipe, instead of regrouping on cooldown timers.

NeuroRank's Tilt module (Bet Under Pressure) directly operationalizes tilt across three phases: a baseline, a simulated failure phase, and a recovery phase. RT, accuracy, and betting behavior are compared across phases, and the size and speed of recovery from the failure phase produces the Tilt Recovery dimension score.