Person Shooter Research Articles

Online FPS games: effect of router buffer and multiplexing techniques on subjective quality estimators

First Person Shooters are a genre of online games in which users demand a high interactivity, because the actions and the movements are very fast. They usually generate high rates of small packets which have to be delivered to the server within a deadline. When the traffic of a number of players shares the same link, these flows can be aggregated in order to save bandwidth. Certain multiplexing techniques are able to merge a number of packets, in a similar way to voice trunking, creating a bundle which is transmitted using a tunnel. In addition, the headers of the original packets can be compressed by means of standard algorithms. The characteristics of the buffers of the routers which deliver these bundled packets may have a strong influence on the network impairments (mainly delay, jitter and packet loss) which determine the quality of the game. A subjective quality estimator has been used in order to study the mutual influence of the buffer and multiplexing techniques. Taking into account that there exist buffers which size is measured in terms of bytes, and others measured in packets, both kinds of buffers have been tested, using different sizes. Traces from real game parties have been merged in order to obtain the traffic of 20 simultaneous players sharing the same Internet access. The delay and jitter produced by the buffer of the access router have been obtained using simulations. In general, the quality is expected to be reduced as the background traffic grows, but the results show an anomalous region in which the quality rises with the background traffic amount. Small buffers present better subjective quality results than bigger ones. When the total traffic amount gets above the available bandwidth, the buffers measured in bytes add to the packets a fixed delay, which grows with buffer size. They present a jitter peak when the offered traffic is roughly the link capacity. On the other hand, buffers which size is measured in packets add a smaller delay, but they increase packet loss for gaming traffic. The obtained results illustrate the need of knowing the characteristics of the buffer in order to make the correct decision about traffic multiplexing. As a conclusion, it would be interesting for game developers to identify the behaviour of the router buffer so as to adapt the traffic to it.

Online Games Traffic Multiplexing: Analysisand Effect in Access Networks

Enterprises that develop online games have to deploy supporting infrastructures, including hardware and bandwidth resources, in order to provide a good service to users. First Person Shooter games generate high rates of small UDP packets from the client to the server, so the overhead is significant. This work analyzes a method that saves bandwidth, by the addition of a local agent which queues packets, compresses headers and uses a tunnel to send a number of packets within a multiplexed packet. The behavior of the system has been studied, showing that significant bandwidth savings can be achieved. For certain titles, up to 38% of the bandwidth can be saved for IPv4. This percentage increases to 54% for IPv6, as this protocol has a bigger overhead. The cost of these bandwidth savings is the addition of a new delay, which has an upper bound that can be modified. So there is a tradeoff: the greater the added delays, the greater the bandwidth savings. Significant reductions in the amounts of packets per second generated can also be obtained. Tests have been deployed in an emulated scenario matching an access network, showing that if the number of players is big enough, the added delays can be acceptable in terms of user experience.

The Governmentality of Battlefield Space

With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective, a potentially productive means of understanding the complexities of this sphere is through the lens of Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality—a concept that ties together the actions and preferred outcomes of the modern surveillance state with the microlevel actions of individual behavior. In this analytical framework, social norms are inculcated through subtle forms of coercion, where the state establishes the field of action in which state subjects ultimately perform self-discipline. This article argues that the first person shooter genre inculcates what I refer to as the governmentality of battlefield space: a form of discipline in which players adhere to gamic norms of performance—efficiency, proficiency, and masculine performativity—which are delineated by ludic structures and largely understood on terms which originate within the social ecology of gaming. The genre accomplishes this though disciplinary techniques such as informational verisimilitude, statistics, and masculinized “gamer” discourse, particularly during multiplayer instances, in which players constitute social understandings of what is “good” and “bad” play. It is on these terms that virtual combat performance and player performance become conflated in a kind of masculinized performance, which both adheres to and undermines traditional, hegemonic norms of (Western) military masculinity. This phenomenon transcends local social realities, and highlights the ways in which particular aspects of gaming and combat appear to have increasingly overlapping phenomenological and ontological qualities, working to produce a form of self-performance that may be required of tomorrow’s soldiers.

From Brain Waves to Game Design: A Study on Analyzing and Manipulating Player Interest Levels

Traditional single player first person shooter (FPS) games adopt a generally linear level design. Players are not given much choice as to where to go next, and thus it is paramount that the designer is able to keep the player interested throughout the whole level. It is widely accepted that in order to keep the player's interest, it is important to offer the player a varied gaming experience by presenting high interest and low interest encounters in an alternating fashion. However, while there are general theories and rules of thumb as to how this can be done, there is little formal knowledge about how exactly high or low interest levels can be achieved. Our goal is to create a better understanding on how to design encounters that affect interest levels in linear FPS games. Specifically, how exactly a player's interest levels can be raised intentionally. To accomplish this, we developed a method for measuring and comparing player interest levels based on electroencephalogram (EEG) data measured using a “Neurosky Mindset” unit, which is a commercially available EEG device. We measured player EEG data for the first 4 levels of the FPS game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” and calculated player interest levels for the entire length of gameplay. By referring to recorded gameplay videos, we were able to associate each increase in interest levels for each player to a specific point in game. From this data, we found and isolated points in each level where most players showed a rise in interest levels, and discovered that certain patterns existed between these situations. These findings led to another study where we further analyzed these situations and found out what factors caused most players to show a rise in interest levels. We were able to divide these factors into 6 different categories called Triggers: “Anticipation”, “Concentration”, “Surprise”, “Frustration”, “Overwhelm” and “Fear”. As these triggers represent mutually exclusive elements that affect a player's interest levels, we found that in most situations where many test subjects showed a rise in interest levels, more than one trigger is present, a phenomenon we call Stacking. While our study is still ongoing, we believe that by using these triggers as guidelines, game designers will be able to intentionally plan and control the player's interest level for FPS games with a certain level of guarantee.

Comparative Effects of First-Person Shooter Video Game Experience and Brain Stimulation on Threat Detection Learning

We have previously shown that 2 mA of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the right inferior cortex improved sensitivity ( d’) during learning and 24-hour retention of a complex visual perceptual learning task, independent of changes in response bias ( ß) (Falcone et al., 2012). Because some participants in that study had video game experience, the current study investigated the effect of three different levels of video game experience on the learning rate for the same perceptual task: non-video game players (NVGPs), gamers with low 1st person shooter gaming expertise (Low-1stVGPs), and gamers with high 1st person shooter gaming expertise (High-1stVGPs). There were graded group differences in d’ but not in ß by the end of the training: NVGPs had the lowest sensitivity, Low-1stVGPs intermediate, and High-1stVGPs the highest. The High-1stVGPs group had significantly higher perceptual sensitivity than the NVGPs group and, while not statistically significant, there was a clear trend of a higher perceptual sensitivity for the High-1stVGPs group over the Low-1stVGPs. In addition, the rate of learning in the High-1stVGP was comparable to that of the group receiving 2 mA tDCS. While the High-1stVGP group had a slightly lower d’ value by the end of training, it was not significantly different from that of the 2 mA tDCS group. The results indicate that 1st person shooter videogame experience and brain stimulation have comparable beneficial effects on complex perceptual learning. Both types of effects have been attributedto enhancement of visual attention. Thus, even greater benefits for augmenting learning might be possible by administering tDCS to individuals with 1st person shooter videogame experience.

Gender and player characteristics in video game play of preadolescents

The present study explores the relation among different characteristics of preadolescents and their video game habits and preferences. Specifically, the predictive power of age, gender, and psychological adjustment on time spent playing video games and game preference was explored. Children ages 10–15 were given two surveys: a video game habits survey and the BASC-II self-report assessment of personality. Results confirm previous findings of significant gender differences in both time spent playing video games and game type preference. For preadolescents, males were found to spend more time overall playing video games, but for both males and females time spent playing increased with age. No relation was found between time spent playing video games and negative psychological adjustment, as assessed by the BASC-II. Game type preference was predicted by several psychological characteristics. For example, females’ positive feelings about the self were associated with increased likelihood of electing First Person Shooters as a favored game type, and males’ internalizing difficulties were associated with decreased likelihood of electing Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). The current findings confirm previous results with preadolescents, an under-studied age group, and lend novel insight into the psychological processes that contribute to video game preference.

Neural Strategies for Selective Attention Distinguish Fast-Action Video Game Players

We investigated the psychophysical and neurophysiological differences between fast-action video game players (specifically first person shooter players, FPS) and non-action players (role-playing game players, RPG) in a visual search task. We measured both successful detections (hit rates) and steady-state visually evoked EEG potentials (SSVEPs). Search difficulty was varied along two dimensions: number of adjacent attended and ignored regions (1, 2 and 4), and presentation rate of novel search arrays (3, 8.6 and 20 Hz). Hit rates decreased with increasing presentation rates and number of regions, with the FPS players performing on average better than the RPG players. The largest differences in hit rate, between groups, occurred when four regions were simultaneously attended. We computed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of SSVEPs and used partial least squares regression to model hit rates, SNRs and their relationship at 3 Hz and 8.6 Hz. The following are the most significant results: RPG players’ parietal responses to the attended 8.6 Hz flicker were predictive of hit rate and were positively correlated with it, indicating attentional signal enhancement. FPS players’ parietal responses to the ignored 3 Hz flicker were predictive of hit rate and were positively correlated with it, indicating distractor suppression. Consistent with these parietal responses, RPG players’ frontal responses to the attended 8.6 Hz flicker, increased as task difficulty increased with number of regions; FPS players’ frontal responses to the ignored 3 Hz flicker increased with number of regions. Thus the FPS players appear to employ an active suppression mechanism to deploy selective attention simultaneously to multiple interleaved regions, while RPG primarily use signal enhancement. These results suggest that fast-action gaming can affect neural strategies and the corresponding networks underlying attention, presumably by training mechanisms of distractor suppression.

REED

Online First Person Shooter (FPS) games typically use a client-server communication model, with thousands of enthusiast-hosted game servers active at any time. Traditional FPS server discovery may take minutes, as clients create thousands of short-lived packet flows while probing all available servers to find a selection of game servers with tolerable round trip time (RTT). REED reduces a client's probing time and network traffic to 1% of traditional server discovery. REED game servers participate in a centralized, incremental calculation of their network coordinates, and clients use these coordinates to expedite the discovery of servers with low RTTs.

Action video gaming and cognitive control: playing first person shooter games is associated with improvement in working memory but not action inhibition

The interest in the influence of videogame experience in our daily life is constantly growing. "First Person Shooter" (FPS) games require players to develop a flexible mindset to rapidly react and monitor fast moving visual and auditory stimuli, and to inhibit erroneous actions. This study investigated whether and to which degree experience with such videogames generalizes to other cognitive control tasks. Experienced video game players (VGPs) and individuals with little to no videogame experience (NVGPs) performed on a N-back task and a stop-signal paradigm that provide a relatively well-established diagnostic measure of the monitoring and updating of working memory (WM) and response inhibition (an index of behavioral impulsivity), respectively. VGPs were faster and more accurate in the monitoring and updating of WM than NVGPs, which were faster in reacting to go signals, but showed comparable stopping performance. Our findings support the idea that playing FPS games is associated with enhanced flexible updating of task-relevant information without affecting impulsivity.

A Cross-Genre Study of Online Gaming

One key limitation with the contemporary online gaming research literature is that much of the published research has tended to examine only one genre of games (i.e., Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games). Three relatively little studied online games are First Person Shooter (FPS) Games, Role Play Games (RPG), and Real Time Strategy (RTS) Games. Therefore, the current study examines player behaviour and characteristics in these three relatively under-researched online gaming genres. The study examines the differences between the three different game genres in terms of: (i) the demographic profile of players, (ii) the social interactions of players including the number and quality of friends, and how gaming related to real life friendship, and (iii) motivations to play specific game genres. The sample comprised 353 self-selected players. The RPG genre had the highest percentage of female players. The number of hours played per week varied significantly between the genres. RPG players played significantly longer hours than FPS or RTS players. In relation to playing motivation, achievement levels were highest for the FPS genre with RPG genre having the lowest achievement levels. RPG players had the highest immersion levels. RTS players were significantly less likely to report having made friends than players of the other two genres.

DEVELOP-FPS: a First Person Shooter Development Tool for Rule-based Scripts

We present DEVELOP-FPS, a software tool specially designed for the development of First Person Shooter (FPS) players controlled by Rule Based Scripts. DEVELOP-FPS may be used by FPS developers to create, debug, maintain and compare rule base player behaviours, providing a set of useful functionalities: i) for an easy preparation of the right scenarios for game debugging and testing; ii) for controlling the game execution: users can stop and resume the game execution at any instant, monitoring and controlling every player in the game, monitoring the state of each player, their rule base activation, being able to issue commands to control their behaviour; and iii) to automatically run a certain number of game executions and collect data in order to evaluate and compare the players performance along a sufficient number of similar experiments.

First person shooters: can a smarter network save bandwidth without annoying the players?

Real-time services are very challenging for current network infrastructures. One of these services is online gaming, which has acquired more importance in the last years. The quality experienced by users could be improved by the use of a smarter network, which includes some proxies near the players in order to transfer intelligence from the game server to network borders. Proxies have been largely used for other services, such as web browsing and VoIP. First Person Shooters are a popular genre of online games that generate high rates of small packets. This issue becomes important in some scenarios where many flows of a game share the same path, as would happen between a proxy and the central server of a game. These flows could be multiplexed to improve efficiency by reducing packet overhead, thus allowing a bigger number of players to share the same link. A method named Tunneling, Compressing, and Multiplexing (TCM) has been proposed to multiplex these flows. In this article, this method has been tested using the traffic of eight popular First Person Shooters. The method has shown its ability to achieve bandwidth savings of about 30 percent for IPv4 and above 50 percent for IPv6 for all the games. The added delay and jitter are small enough to not annoy players.

The SimpleFPS Planning Domain: A PDDL Benchmark for Proactive NPCs

In this paper we focus on proactive behavior for non-player characters (NPCs) in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre of video games based on goal-oriented planning. Some recent approaches for applying real-time planning in commercial video games show that the existing hardware is starting to follow up on the computing resources needed for such techniques to work well. Nonetheless, it is not clear under which conditions real-time efficiency can be guaranteed. In this paper we give a precise specification of SimpleFPS, a STRIPS planning domain expressed in PDDL that captures some basic planning tasks that may be useful in a first person shooter video game. This is intended to work as a first step towards quantifying the performance of different planning techniques that may be used in real-time to guide the behavior of NPCs. We present a simple tool we developed for generating random planning problem instances in PDDL with user defined properties, and show some preliminary results based on SimpleFPS instances that vary in the size of the domain and two well-known planners from the planning community.

Reward system and temporal pole contributions to affective evaluation during a first person shooter video game

BackgroundViolent content in video games evokes many concerns but there is little research concerning its rewarding aspects. It was demonstrated that playing a video game leads to striatal dopamine release. It is unclear, however, which aspects of the game cause this reward system activation and if violent content contributes to it. We combined functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with individual affect measures to address the neuronal correlates of violence in a video game.ResultsThirteen male German volunteers played a first-person shooter game (Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror) during fMRI measurement. We defined success as eliminating opponents, and failure as being eliminated themselves. Affect was measured directly before and after game play using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Failure and success events evoked increased activity in visual cortex but only failure decreased activity in orbitofrontal cortex and caudate nucleus. A negative correlation between negative affect and responses to failure was evident in the right temporal pole (rTP).ConclusionsThe deactivation of the caudate nucleus during failure is in accordance with its role in reward-prediction error: it occurred whenever subject missed an expected reward (being eliminated rather than eliminating the opponent). We found no indication that violence events were directly rewarding for the players. We addressed subjective evaluations of affect change due to gameplay to study the reward system. Subjects reporting greater negative affect after playing the game had less rTP activity associated with failure. The rTP may therefore be involved in evaluating the failure events in a social context, to regulate the players' mood.

Do avatars dream of electric steak? Video games and the gendered semiotics of food

The aim of this article is to investigate how food in the sense of organic and synthetic, domestic and political energy supply systems is represented in a selection of gendered (Desperate Housewives and Quake 4) and agendered (The Sims 2) video games. The games were chosen on the basis of their representations of gendered space and, closely related to it, of food and other energy supply systems. I propose a spectrum between the feminized private sphere and the masculinized public sphere (cf. Habermas 1989). The society simulation Desperate Housewives is discussed as an extreme example of the former and juxtaposed to first person shooter (FPS) Quake 4, a radical example of the latter. The Sims 2, which takes an agendered approach to both spheres, is examined as a compromise between both polar opposites. Unlike many other video game genres, such as adventures, role-playing games and society and civilization simulations, FPSs tend to delete semiotically the basic human need for organic nutrition. Instead, they typically feature abstract, synthetic energy supply systems, which are integrated in the circular structure of physical rejuvenation and exhaustion. Quake 4 has been selected for this food-semiotic study as it displays the human body as processable, technologically modifiable matter for alien consumption and reincarnation – as a neo-Frankensteinian, infinitely recyclable repository of animate yet simultaneously disembodied substitutes, accessories or supplements used to form cyborgian hybrids for the sustenance of Gothic war machines. My theoretical discussion centres around relevant aspects of food cultural and semiotic theory, as well as the ludological implications of the essentially anti- Cartesian discourse of transcendence and the theory of the double-situatedness of the gaming body.

Mapping MMOFPS over heterogeneous distributed systems

This paper evaluates the effects on performance of taking the heterogeneity of nodes into account, in terms of number of cores, when MMOFPS (Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter) game services are distributed. Two mapping strategies, Non_Heterogeneity_aware and Heterogeneity_aware, are integrated in a system, called OnDeGaS (On Demand Game Service), which is a hybrid between Client-Server and P2P topologies. Through simulation, we show that the Heterogeneity_aware mechanism has more impact in communication costs, but it is more efficient in exploiting the nodes of the P2P area, as it maps players faster and it creates less computing zones with latency values under the acceptable threshold for MMOFPS games.

Reinforcement Learning in First Person Shooter Games

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular machine learning technique that has many successes in learning how to play classic style games. Applying RL to first person shooter (FPS) games is an interesting area of research as it has the potential to create diverse behaviors without the need to implicitly code them. This paper investigates the tabular Sarsa (λ) RL algorithm applied to a purpose built FPS game. The first part of the research investigates using RL to learn bot controllers for the tasks of navigation, item collection, and combat individually. Results showed that the RL algorithm was able to learn a satisfactory strategy for navigation control, but not to the quality of the industry standard pathfinding algorithm. The combat controller performed well against a rule-based bot, indicating promising preliminary results for using RL in FPS games. The second part of the research used pretrained RL controllers and then combined them by a number of different methods to create a more generalized bot artificial intelligence (AI). The experimental results indicated that RL can be used in a generalized way to control a combination of tasks in FPS bots such as navigation, item collection, and combat.

A study on pc - video games in terms of the space awareness from childhood to youth

Games are used in education for concentration in the class, transfering-getting information in a easy and enjoyable way, making the lesson interesting. Today in the era of technology, young generation spend most of their time on playing Pc games. Some of these games can be considered as platforms of education. In the first year of architectural education, students complain about the intensive courses. The key problem is having a nodding acquaintance with space. Before the profession education these games can help to create a background for space sensibility. Basic purpose of this study is to discuss chosen Pc games for the awareness of space before the architectural education (for anybody). These games include web-based games, city-building games, first / third person shooter games and sandbox games. In the light of discussed games, an architectural pc game for the first year architectural education as an education game is suggested. By the help of suggested game, without risking personal injury, students will have a chance to create spaces in an enjoyable and reasonable way, have direct relationship with the space, pay more attention what is taught, enhance computer using, experience problem solving.

DOOM'd to switch: superior cognitive flexibility in players of first person shooter games

The interest in the influence of videogame experience on our daily life is constantly growing. “First Person Shooter” (FPS) games require players to develop a flexible mindset to rapidly react to fast moving visual and auditory stimuli, and to switch back and forth between different subtasks. This study investigated whether and to which degree experience with such videogames generalizes to other cognitive-control tasks. Video-game players (VGPs) and individuals with little to no videogame experience (NVGPs) performed on a task switching paradigm that provides a relatively well-established diagnostic measure of cognitive flexibility. As predicted, VGPs showed smaller switching costs (i.e., greater cognitive flexibility) than NVGPs. Our findings support the idea that playing FPS games promotes cognitive flexibility.

Action Recognition for Support of Adaptive Gameplay: A Case Study of a First Person Shooter

With games continuously and rapidly evolving to become more complex and sophisticated in their nature and implementation. There is a fundamental need to sustain and deliver a similarly advanced, realistic, and engaging experience for the player. The implementation of “emergence” within games as providing an effective means to sustain this engagement in conjunction with some form of action recognition mechanism for its support. More recently, games have made much of the “adaptive” mechanisms that tailor the player experience during the game, but much of this appears to be implemented by merely making the game harder according to the success of the player. Some go further than this by incorporating adaptive AI that change agent tactics to suit the player's style of play. Whilst these are clearly advances in the approach to providing a player-centric experience to engage the player, the basis and transferability of these approaches is open to question. Here we propose a limited flavour of “emergence” which can be used to support an adaptive game mechanism and so present players with different gameplay experiences based on their actions within the game.