Spaz! The Effects of Local Latency on Player Actions in a Desktop-Based Exergame

Technological advancement has decreased network latencies while simultaneously increasing local latencies. This may impact exergames—video games that incorporate exercise—the most since exergames tend to have complicated platforms to capture player actions. This article presents a study using a custom desktop-based exergame that controls for local latency and measures player performance and quality of experience (QoE). Analysis of the results from a 37-person user study shows that while player performance and QoE degrade with latency, exergame actions are fairly tolerant of even hundreds of milliseconds of latency. Our data point toward a crucial tipping point at latency values of approximately 400 ms.