The effects of resolution on users playing first person shooter games

Computer games are often played on devices with varying display resolutions. While higher resolutions generally provide more immersive game play they can yield reduced frame rates and/or increased costs, making choosing the optimal reso- lution important. Despite this importance, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no extensive study of the effects of resolution on users playing computer games. This paper presents results from extensive user studies measuring the impact of resolution on users playing First Person Shooter games. The studies focus on the effects of resolution in conjunction with low and high contrast virtual environments, full screen and windowed modes and identification of long-range objects. Analysis indicates resolution has little impact on performance over the range of conditions tested and only matters when the objects being identified are far away or small and are reduced to too few pixels to be distinguishable. Game players, and computer users in general, are constantly pushing for higher display resolutions. Higher resolutions provide the opportunity for finer levels of detail that make a game virtual world more immersive and can provide infor- mation that helps with the game play. While maximizing the resolution may be desirable, higher resolutions often come at the expense of lower frame rates, making the game play less smooth and responsive. The diversity of gaming hardware exacerbates the problem, forcing game platform designers and game developers to combine the available capabilities of the hardware with an ad hoc understanding of the effects of resolution on game play in an effort to provide compelling computer games. Much of the intuition for the effects of resolution on games is based on studies of perceived quality for video.1{3 These studies have examined the effects of resolution on users passively watching streaming video, and generally find that satisfaction with the video degrades sharply with a decrease in resolution. However, passively watching video does not have the same interaction requirements as does playing a computer game, and computer game players often care most about their performance in the game, not necessarily their perception of quality. Other studies1, 4{7 have examined the effects of resolution on users actively engaged in an interactive media environment. These studies have generally found that resolution can affect performance, but is not as directly correlated to performance as resolution is for users passively watching video. However, even these more interactive applications do not have the same requirements in terms of response time as do computer games. Our previous work on the effects of display settings on computer games presented results from a user study that measured the impact of frame rate and resolution on user performance in a First Person Shooter (FPS) game.8 Contrary to previous results for streaming video, display resolution was shown to have little impact on user performance. While the user study had a significantly large user base so as to be statistically meaningful, the study only tested the FPS game in a full screen mode with the opponent easily identified because of the high contrast map used in the study. This paper expands