Immediate auditory feedback accelerates adaptation to visuomotor delay in video games

Xuyuan Duan¹ (), Colleen Macklin², Benjamin van Buren¹; ¹The New School, ²Parsons School of Design

Visuomotor latency is a problem in online games. When latency occurs, players must add input lead time by entering input earlier. But when pressing a key, it is hard to know exactly when it was registered. To adapt to in-game latency, we must first measure it precisely. This requires performing a kind of implicit ‘debugging’ of how much of the total latency between keypresses and onscreen events is arising after our keypress is registered. Here we hypothesized that immediate auditory feedback helps players perceive when input was registered, and thus speeds adaptation to latency. We conducted two online experiments. Experiment 1 (N=400) used an Interception task in which players pressed a key to stop a moving dot at a target. Experiment 2 (N=300) used a modified version of DinoRun, a scrolling platformer in which players time the jump of a dinosaur avatar to collect coins. In both experiments, players first completed several baseline trials with no latency between when their keypress was registered and the resulting onscreen event. Partway through the experiment, we secretly introduced latency, and measured how long it took players to adapt to this by pressing their key earlier. Players were randomly assigned to either an Immediate auditory feedback condition in which a beep sound played instantly upon keypress, or a Delayed auditory feedback condition in which the sound was synchronized with the delayed visual event. In both experiments, visuomotor adaptation to latency was much faster with Immediate auditory feedback than with Delayed auditory feedback. We conclude that feedback about precisely when key input was registered aids in the disambiguation of in-game latency and speeds visuomotor adaptation. Compared to laying new fiber-optic cable, providing immediate auditory feedback to players presents an easy and low-cost way to improve their adaptation to delay in online games.