How responsiveness affects players' perception in digital games

Abstract

Digital games with realistic virtual characters have become very popular. The ability for players to promptly control their character is a crucial feature of these types of games, be it platform games, first-person shooters, or role-playing games. Controller latencies, meaning delays in the responsiveness of a player's character, for example due to extensive computations or to network latencies, can considerably reduce the player's enjoyment of a game. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the consequences of such delays on the player's experience across three parts of a game with different levels of difficulty. We investigate the effects of responsiveness on the player's enjoyment, performance, and perception of the game, as well as the player's adaptability to delays. We find that responsiveness is very important for the player as delays affect the player's enjoyment of the game as well as the player's performance. A quick responsiveness becomes essential for more challenging tasks. AbstractDigital games with realistic virtual characters have become very popular. The ability for players to promptly control their character is a crucial feature of these types of games, be it platform games, first-person shooters, or role-playing games. Controller latencies, meaning delays in the responsiveness of a player's character, for example due to extensive computations or to network latencies, can considerably reduce the player's enjoyment of a game. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the consequences of such delays on the player's experience across three parts of a game with different levels of difficulty. We investigate the effects of responsiveness on the player's enjoyment, performance, and perception of the game, as well as the player's adaptability to delays. We find that responsiveness is very important for the player as delays affect the player's enjoyment of the game as well as the player's performance. A quick responsiveness becomes essential for more challenging tasks.

The impact of latency on perceptual judgments and motor performance in closed-loop interaction in virtual reality

“…Studies involving different setups and sensorimotor tasks come to different conclusions when investigating the perceptual threshold for delay detection. Users might be unaware of delays below 120 ms [Mauve et al 2004], or below 150 ms when controlling characters in computer games [Jörg et al 2012]. Even delays around 200 ms between mouse movements and cursor movements or between a button press and a visual stimulus might go unnoticed [Raaen et al 2014;Rohde et al 2014a].…”

“…This holds especially for applications in which users obtain real-time feedback of their action, as is the case when they are presented with their own avatar. In setups presenting delayed visual feedback with respect to motor performance, high latencies influence perceived temporal coherence of the scene, sense of agency, sense of ownership, as well as motor performance [Franck et al 2001;Longo and Haggard 2009;Jörg et al 2012;Imaizumi and Asai 2015]. If we had knowledge on which duration of latencies is still acceptable with respect to these factors, we would be able to design systems that reduce the risk of suffering from latency.…”

“…While Held and Durlach [1991] report that delays as small as 60 ms significantly interfere with motor adaptation, others reported a threshold of 120 ms or 150 ms to perceive latency (e.g., [Mauve et al 2004;Jörg et al 2012]). Furthermore, the impact of latency is often only considered with respect to one single factor (e.g., perception of simultaneity Raaen et al 2014]).…”

Realizing a low-latency virtual reality environment for motor learning

“…Literature suggests values of 150 ms for controlling characters in computer games, since higher latencies are already directly noticeable for untrained users and affect players in several ways [Jörg et al 2012]. Meehan et al [2003] showed that decreasing the latency from 90 ms to 50 ms already affects presence in virtual environments.…”

CuDi3D: Curvilinear displacement based approach for online 3D action detection

“…High latency causes in fact system feedback to lag behind user actions and thus significantly degrades the interactivity of the user experience. Therefore, several approaches were proposed so as to reliably recognize actions with minimal latency [4,21,3,22,23,24]. Ellis et al [3] proposed new algorithms for reducing latency for both presegmented and online action classification tasks.…”