The Effects of Auditory Latency on Game Experience and Player Performance

Generally speaking, latency is the difference in time between cause and effect. In human-computer interaction (HCI), latency is the time that passes before a user perceives the reactions to a actions. Perception and thus latency is not limited to one channel but can be auditory, visual or haptic in nature [1].

Visual latency leads to poor performance and user experience in HCI[2,3]. Video games are also affected by the negative effects of visual latency. Players score fewer points, need more time to work on certain tasks, or can not solve certain tasks at all [4, 5]. While high visual latency is known to negatively influence game experience and player performance, it is unclear how auditory latency affects the player.

However, the sound of a game is assumed to be important to how users feel while playing and how well they perform in-game. Therefore, developers have placed a steadily increasing focus on audio and sounds in games[6].

This work investigates if and how auditory latency impacts user experience and performance.

To investigate if and how auditory latency impacts game experience and player performance by conducting a user study.

• Literature research
• Implementing sound to an existing video game
• Conduct a user study
• Evaluate the data
• Write the scientific paper

• Programming in unity and c#
• Data analysis

[1] Latency. (2021). Wikipeda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering), Retrieved: 12.03.2021

[2] Jota, R., Ng, A., Dietz, P. & Wigdor, D. (2013). How fast is fast enough? a study of the effects of latency in direct-touch pointing tasks. In Proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems (S. 2291–2300). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/2470654.2481317

[3] Annett, M., Anderson, F., Bischof, W. F. & Gupta, A. (2014). The pen is mightier: Understanding stylus behaviour while inking on tablets. In Proceedings of graphics interface 2014 (S. 193–200). CAN: Canadian Information Processing Society. doi: 10.5555/2619648.2619680

[4] Beigbeder, T., Coughlan, R., Lusher, C., Plunkett, J., Agu, E. & Claypool, M. (2004). The effects of loss and latency on user performance in unreal tournament 2003®. In Proceedings of 3rd acm sigcomm workshop on network and system support for games (S. 144–151). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/1016540.1016556

[5] Eg, R., Raaen, K. & Claypool, M. (2018). Playing with delay: With poor timing comes poor performance, and experience follows suit. In 2018 tenth international conference on quality of multimedia experience (qomex) (S. 1–6). doi: 10.1109/QoMEX .2018.8463382

[6] Andersen, F., King, C. L., & Gunawan, A. A. (2021). Audio Influence on Game Atmosphere during Various Game Events. Procedia Computer Science, 179, 222-231.

[7] https://www.fairaudio.de/news/kabelgebundene-vs-bluetooth-kopfhoerer/

[8] Cassioli, D., Detti, A., Loreti, P., Mazzenga, F., & Vatalaro, F. (2002, May). The Bluetooth technology: state of the art and networking aspects. In International Conference on Research in Networking (pp. 479-490). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

[9] Hussein, A. F., Hashim, S. J., Aziz, A. F. A., Rokhani, F. Z., & Adnan, W. A. W. (2017). A real time ECG data compression scheme for enhanced bluetooth low energy ECG system power consumption. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-14.