FirstPersonScience: Quantifying Psychophysics for First Person Shooter Tasks

In the emerging field of esports research, there is an increasing demand for quantitative results that can be used by players, coaches and analysts to make decisions and present meaningful commentary for spectators. We present FirstPersonScience, a software application intended to fill this need in the esports community by allowing scientists to design carefully controlled experiments and capture accurate results in the First Person Shooter esports genre. An experiment designer can control a variety of parameters including target motion, weapon configuration, 3D scene, frame rate, and latency. Furthermore, we validate this application through careful end-to-end latency analysis and provide a case study showing how it can be used to demonstrate the training effect of one user given repeated task performance. Introduction In competitive First Person Shooter (FPS) video games, players are frequently faced with a need to hit their opponent before their opponent hits them. The player to fire first while maintaining enough accuracy to hit the target will win any engagement that is otherwise strategically equivalent. Carefully controlled user studies are needed to understand what game and hardware characteristics are most important for player performance in competitive FPS games. FirstPersonScience is a tool we developed to conduct these kinds of user studies. Using FirstPersonScience, researchers can design user studies and gather high quality objective measurements of player behavior and system performance while isolating variables of interest (Kim, et al., 2019). We provide FirstPersonScience as an open source project to enable other researchers to conduct similar studies and make it more feasible to reproduce scientific results. Features FirstPersonScience supports a variety of features for psychophysical analysis of users, game software design exploration and computer hardware analysis. These three pillars are central to the sort of user studies we believe will be most useful.