Competitive first-person shooter games are played over a network, where latency can degrade player performance. To better understand latency's impact, a promising approach is to study how latency affects individual game actions, such as aiming and shooting. While target selection (aiming at an opponent) is fairly well studied, navigation (moving an avatar into position) is not. This paper presents results from a 30-person user study that evaluates the impact of latency on first-person navigation using a custom "hide and seek" game that isolates avatar movement in manner intended to be similar to avatar movements in a first-person shooter game. Analysis of the results shows latency has pronounced effects on player performance (score and positioning to seek), with subjective opinions on Quality of Experience following suit.

Materials:

• Paper: pdf
• Slides: pptx

See also:

• Shengmei Liu, Atsuo Kuwahara, James Scovell, Jamie Sherman, and Mark Claypool. The Effects of Network Latency on Competitive First-Person Shooter Game Players, In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), Virtual Conference, June 14-17, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/csgo-net-21/

• Shengmei Liu, Atsuo Kuwahara, James Scovell, Jamie Sherman, and Mark Claypool. Lower is Better? The Effects of Local Latencies on Competitive First-Person Shooter Game Players, In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Virtual Conference, May 8-13, 2021. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/csgo-lag-21/