Player Perception of Delays and Jitter in Character Responsiveness

Response lag in digital games is known to negatively affect a player’s game experience. Particularly with networked multiplayer games, where lag is typically unavoidable, the impact of delays needs to be well understood so that its effects can be mitigated. In this paper, we investigate two aspects of lag independently: latency (constant delay) and jitter (varying delay). We evaluate how latency and jitter each affect a player’s enjoyment, frustration, performance, and experience as well as the extent to which players can adjust to such delays after a few minutes of gameplay. We focus on a platform game where the player controls a virtual character through a world. We find that delays up to 300ms do not impact the players’ experience as long as they are constant. When jitter was added to a delay of 200ms, however, the lag was noticed by participants more often, hindered players’ ability to improve with practice, increased how often they failed to reach the goal of the game, and reduced the perceived motion quality of the character

Stochastic Activity Authoring With Direct User Control

Crowd activities are often randomized to create the appearance of heterogeneity. However, the parameters that control randomization are frequently hard to tune because it is unclear how changes at the character level affect the high-level appearance of the crowd. We propose a method for computing randomization parameters that supports direct animator control. Given details about the environment, available activities, timing information and the desired highlevel appearance of the crowd, we model the problem as a graph, formulate a convex optimization problem, and solve for a set of stochastic transition rates which satisfy the constraints. Unlike the use of heuristics for adding randomness to crowd activities, our approach provides guarantees on convergence to the desired result, allows for decentralized simulation, and supports a variety of constraints. In addition, because the rates can be pre-computed, no additional runtime processing is needed during simulation

Egress Online: Towards Leveraging Massively, Multiplayer Environments for Evacuation Studies

Large datasets of real human behaviors are of huge benefit across numerous domains, including evacuation safety, urban planning, marketing, and ergonomics. However, because large-scale experiments involving real human subjects are expensive and prohibitively difficult to organize, such datasets are scarce. Thus in this paper, we propose the use of massively multiplayer online (MMO) communities as an inexpensive and innovative way to capture datasets of large numbers of people under different conditions. We describe our implementation of an online data collection system, based on games, inside the popular massively multiplayer, online environment of Second Life. We evaluate the use of this system for performing evacuation experiments using a mix of Second Life residents and players recruited on campus. Our system was able to draw online participants, support data collection needs, and provide potential insights into high-level evacuation behaviors such as the choices of exit, effects of building debris, and the use-patterns of a building. Through experiments performed using our system, we found that Second Life residents found the game controls and environment to be significantly more compelling than lab participants; that players unfamiliar with our office building tended to evacuate primarily via the front entrance; and that in-game debris significantly increased the numbers of participants who failed to exit a building safely

How Responsiveness Affects Players\u27 Perception in Digital Games

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

An authoring tool to provide group and crowd animation using Natural Language scripts

Virtual environments have become ubiquitous, expanding beyond games into the domains of architecture, engineering, psychology, education, and archaeology. Furthermore, virtual humans can further enhance these environments when they provide compelling and coherent behaviors. In this paper, we present a scripting language based on simple, plain English commands. Our system assists people without game and animation expertise to populate large environments and complex scenarios. To validate our approach, we develop a prototype using Unreal Engine 4 and author a variety of indoor and outdoor agent simulations. Furthermore, we test our prototype with both experienced and inexperienced users, creating scenarios for a residence, mall, psychology scenario, and archaeological site

Evaluating Grasping Visualizations and Control Modes in a VR Game

A primary goal of the Virtual Reality(VR) community is to build fully immersive and presence-inducing environments with seamless and natural interactions. To reach this goal, researchers are investigating how to best directly use our hands to interact with a virtual environment using hand tracking. Most studies in this field require participants to perform repetitive tasks. In this article, we investigate if results of such studies translate into a real application and game-like experience. We designed a virtual escape room in which participants interact with various objects to gather clues and complete puzzles. In a between-subjects study, we examine the effects of two input modalities (controllers vs. hand tracking) and two grasping visualizations (continuously tracked hands vs. virtual hands that disappear when grasping) on ownership, realism, efficiency, enjoyment, and presence. Our results show that ownership, realism, enjoyment, and presence increased when using hand tracking compared to controllers. Visualizing the tracked hands during grasps leads to higher ratings in one of our ownership questions and one of our enjoyment questions compared to having the virtual hands disappear during grasps as is common in many applications. We also confirm some of the main results of two studies that have a repetitive design in a more realistic gaming scenario that might be closer to a typical user experience

An Embeddable Testbed for Insurgent and Terrorist Agent Theories: InsurgiSim

Many simulators today contain traditional opponents and lack an asymmetric insurgent style adversary. InsurgiSim prototypes an embeddable testbed containing a threat network of agents that one can easily configure and deploy for training and analysis purposes. The insurgent network was constructed inside a socio-cognitive agent framework (FactionSim-PMFserv) that includes: (a) a synthesis of best-of-breed models of personality, culture, values, emotions, stress, social relations, mobilization, as well as (b) an IDE for authoring and managing reusable archetypes and their task-sets (Sect. 2). Agents and markups in this library are not scripted, and act to follow their values and fulfill their needs. So it\u27s desirable to profile the agents (e.g., faction leaders, cell logisticians, followers, bomb maker, financier, recruiter, etc.) as faithfully to the real world as possible. Doing this will improve the utility of InsurgiSim for studying what may be driving the insurgent agents in a given area of operation as Sect. 3 explains. InsurgiSim\u27s bridge is an HLA federate and can be embedded to drive all or some of the insurgent agents in a 3rd party simulator. Three such examples are summarized in Sect.4. The paper closes with next steps to improve InsurgiSim\u27s capabilities and utility

Evaluating Perceived Trust From Procedurally Animated Gaze

Adventure role playing games (RPGs) provide players with increasingly expansive worlds, compelling storylines, and meaningful fictional character interactions. Despite the fast-growing richness of these worlds, the majority of interactions between the player and non-player characters (NPCs) still remain scripted. In this paper we propose using an NPC’s animations to reflect how they feel towards the player and as a proof of concept, investigate the potential for a straightforward gaze model to convey trust. Through two perceptual experiments, we find that viewers can distinguish between high and low trust animations, that viewers associate the gaze differences specifically with trust and not with an unrelated attitude (aggression), and that the effect can hold for different facial expressions and scene contexts, even when viewed by participants for a short (five second) clip length. With an additional experiment, we explore the extent that trust is uniquely conveyed over other attitudes associated with gaze, such as interest, unfriendliness, and admiration