A Qualitative Investigation of Users’ Video Game Information Needs and Behaviors

Video games are popular consumer products as well as research subjects, yet little exists about how players and other stakeholders find video games and what information they need to select, acquire, and play video games. With the aim of better understanding people’s game-related information needs and behaviors, we conducted 56 semi-structured interviews with users who find, play, purchase, collect, and recommend video games. Participants included casual and avid gamers, parents, collectors, industry professionals, librarians, and scholars. From this user data, we derive and discuss key design implications for video game information systems: designing for target user populations, enabling recommendations on appeals, offering multiple automatic organization options, and providing relationship-based, user-generated, subject and visual metadata. We anticipate this work will contribute to building future video game information systems with new and improved access to games

Characterizing the Effects of Local Latency on Aim Performance in First Person Shooters

Real-time games such as first-person shooters (FPS) are sensitive to even small amounts of lag. The effects of network latency have been studied, but less is known about local latency -- that is, the lag caused by local sources such as input devices, displays, and the application. While local latency is important to gamers, we do not know how it affects aiming performance and whether we can reduce its negative effects. To explore these issues, we tested local latency in a variety of real-world gaming systems and carried out a controlled study focusing on targeting and tracking activities in an FPS game with varying degrees of local latency. In addition, we tested the ability of a lag compensation technique (based on aim assistance) to mitigate the negative effects. To motivate the need for these studies, we also examined how aim in FPS differs from pointing in standard 2D tasks, showing significant differences in performance metrics. Our studies found local latencies in the real-world range from 23 to 243~ms that cause significant and substantial degradation in performance (even for latencies as low as 41~ms). The studies also showed that our compensation technique worked well, reducing the problems caused by lag in the case of targeting, and removing the problem altogether in the case of tracking. Our work shows that local latency is a real and substantial problem -- but game developers can mitigate the problem with appropriate compensation methods