Towards Applying Game Adaptation to Decrease the Impact of Delay on Quality of Experience

With emerging delay sensitive gaming services such as cloud gaming and online gaming, the importance of understanding and reducing the effect of delay on the gamer's Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes highly important for the success of these services. In this paper, the findings of two subjective experiments investigating the relationship between delay and QoE are reported. In the first study, it was shown that in addition to the direct effect of the delay on QoE, there is a significant indirect effect between delay and QoE through the relationship with performance. In the second part of the paper, we illustrate that adapting characteristics of a game can strongly mitigate the negative effect of delay on gaming QoE due to increased player performance. This adaptation in addition to compensation the effect of the delay, in contrast to the other difficulty adjustment systems, does not require to track the gamer's interaction, behaviors, and profile.

I. Introduction

The growth of the gaming industry has increased the competition around delivering better products and services to the market. On the other hand, services such as Cloud Gaming (CG) and online gaming in the gaming industry have emerged. The idea behind CG is to run the game in a cloud server and stream the rendered scenes as videos to the client. Although CG and online gaming both have many advantages, they require a very low network delay in order to meet high Quality of Experience (QoE), which cannot be guaranteed by the best effort networks.