Understanding Player Performance and Gaming Experience while Playing a First-Person Shooter with Auditory Latency

Visual latency is known to decrease player performance and experience starting at 25 ms. Less is known about the effects of auditory latency in video games. To investigate the effects of auditory latency, we added auditory latency to a publicly available and latency-sensitive first-person shooter game. Using the game, we conducted a study with 24 participants playing the game with four different levels of auditory latency (0 ms, 50 ms, 100 ms, 200 ms). The results of a Bayesian analysis support a model with no true effect of auditory latency on game experience and player performance in first-person shooter games. Hence, our preliminary results indicate that auditory latency may not affect gamers with the same magnitude as visual latency.

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