On the objective evaluation of real-time networked games

With the recent evolution of network-based multiplayer games and the increasing popularity of online games demanding strict real-time interaction among players - like First Person Shooter (FPS) -, game providers face the problem to correlate network conditions with quality of gaming experience. This paper addresses the problem of the estimation gameplay quality during real-time games; in particular, we focus on FPS ones. Current literature usually considers end-to-end delay as the only important parameter and deducts system performance indexes from graphical ones. Player satisfaction, on the other hand, is usually evaluated in a subjective way: asking the player, or measuring how long he/she stays connected. In this paper we use a testbed with synthetic players (bots) to directly correlate network end-to-end delay and jitter with expected players' satisfaction. Running extensive experiments we argue about effective in-game performances degradation of penalized players. Performances are measured in terms of score and number of actions kills, actually - performed per minute.