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Cascading Impact of Lag on User Experience in Cooperative Multiplayer Games

Playing cooperative games should be fun for everyone involved. Part of having fun in games is being able to perform well, be immersed, and stay engaged [18, 30, 31]. These indicators of experience are part of a game player’s Quality of Experience (QoE). One of the primary causes of QoE degradation in online games is lag, a general term for communication delay and loss due to poor network conditions [7, 10, 12, 33, 34, 42]. Current lag mitigation strategies are constructed using the assumption that when evaluating the QoE of a player only that player’s network conditions impact their QoE [5]. We have designed an experimental framework to study the effects of lag on a group of players by measuring a gamut of subjective and objective QoE metrics. Our results indicate that the change in QoE of one player due to their lag has a cascading effect on the QoE of the other players. Understanding a player’s QoE as a cascade function that includes other users’ network conditions provides a more complete understanding of the impact of lag in cooperative multiplayer games. This has the potential to improve lag mitigation strategies for multiplayer games and other group applications.