The Impact of Latency on Navigation in a First-Person Perspective Game

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 moving and shooting. While target selection (aiming and shooting 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 a manner intended to be similar to movement in a first-person shooter game. Analysis of the results shows latency has pronounced effects on player performance (score and seek positioning), with subjective opinions on Quality of Experience following suit.