Towards the delay sensitivity of games: There is more than genres
Steven P. Schmidt, Saman Zadtootaghaj, Sebastian Möller · 2017
Cloud gaming promises many advantages from the user and game developer perspective. But besides its benefits, cloud gaming suffers from two bottlenecks: bandwidth and latency. Although, many researchers have identified delay as an important factor on the QoE in gaming, the cause of varying tolerances towards delay in different games is not yet well understood. In this paper, we want to show that delay sensitivity should not be generalized for an entire game or genre. Instead, a specific scenario with its underlying characteristics should be considered, since differences within the same game can be higher than differences to another game. To investigate the delay sensitivity of games, we assessed quality features such as control, difficulty, delay perception, annoyance, and fairness for highly similar scenarios only differing in their pace or perspective. Results show that changing the pace within the same game can lead to stronger differences in respect to the delay sensitivity than using another game type. Furthermore, we explain how quality features might be used in the judgement process of a player and define a set of input action metrics for a future delay sensitivity based classification of games.