I don't know about action games in general but I definitely feel like highly competitive games (esports) have an extreme mental side to them. I'm thinking about

I don't know about action games in general but I definitely feel like highly competitive games (esports) have an extreme mental side to them. I'm thinking about some of the top games like Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Dota, Starcraft. Most of the difficulty in those games is decision making, being able to keep track of multiple things at once and, at least in the team games, be able to gather information about your opponent and communicate that to your teammates effectively. edit: and you get good at those by playing and practicing that one game for thousands of hours