Effects of Adaptive Time Delay on Quality of Experience in First Person Shooter Games

Samin Shahriar Tokey, James Cannon, Saketh Dinasarapu, Ao Jiang, Hanzalah Qamar, and Mark Claypool

In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG)

Worcester, MA, USA

May 2024

Latency impacts individual responsiveness and player-versus-player fairness in first-person shooter (FPS) games, degrading the quality of experience (QoE). Time delay applies a fixed latency to players with lower latency to make the game fair, but has the drawback of adding latency regardless of whether players are interacting or not. Adaptive time delay dynamically adds latency only when players interact, improving average responsiveness while preserving fairness. This study assesses QoE for adaptive time delay with latency with a focus on the potential benefits of dynamically adding latency compared to always having a fixed latency for the round. A 38-person user study with a custom FPS game shows degredations to QoE with latency, but less so for adaptive time delay.

Materials:

Paper: pdf
Slides: (pending)