Geometrically Compensating Effect of End-to-End Latency in Moving-Target Selection Games

Effects of unintended latency on gamer performance have been reported. End-to-end latency can be corrected by post-input manipulation of activation times, but this gives the player unnatural gameplay experience. For moving-target selection games such as Flappy Bird, the paper presents a predictive model of latency on error rate and a novel compensation method for the latency effects by adjusting the game's geometry design -- e.g., by modifying the size of the selection region. Without manipulation of the game clock, this can keep the user's error rate constant even if the end-to-end latency of the system changes. The approach extends the current model of moving-target selection with two additional assumptions about the effects of latency: (1) latency reduces players' cue-viewing time and (2) pushes the mean of the input distribution backward. The model and method proposed have been validated through precise experiments.