1. [Publications](/publications) 2. The Effects of Network Latency on the Peeker's Advantage in First-person Shooter Games # The Effects of Network Latency on the Peeker's Advantage in First-person Shooter Games ![](/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/publications/tokey_24peeker.png?itok=n4JO_2nJ) In first-person shooter (FPS) games, the peeker's advantage is the edge the moving peeker gets when battling a stationary defender at a corner due to network latency. However, confirmation of (the size of) this advantage based on network latency and the distance from the corner has not been studied. This paper assesses the peeker's advantage via two user studies both using an open-source FPS game extended to support two-player networking and a custom map. Users play as both peeker and defender with 3 different corner distances and 3 different network latencies. Analysis of hits, wins, and time-to-damage shows that the advantage for the peeker is impacted more by the defender's latency than the peeker's latency and is lowest when the peeker is nearest the corner. The user study with a tournament setting had quicker and more competitive matches resulting in more combat encounters and closer games than did the traditional user study. ## Authors Samin Shahriar Tokey (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Zesheng Chen (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Colin Mettler (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) Dexuan Tang (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) [Ben Boudaoud](/person/ben-boudaoud) [Joohwan Kim](/person/joohwan-kim) [Josef Spjut](/person/josef-spjut) Mark Claypool (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) ## Publication Date Tuesday, May 21, 2024 ## Published in [Foundations of Digital Games](https://fdg2024.org/) ## Research Area [Esports](/research-area/esports) [Human Computer Interaction](/research-area/human-computer-interaction) [Networking](/research-area/networking) ## External Links [Project Page](https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/peeker-fdg-24/) ## Uploaded Files [paper](https://d1qx31qr3h6wln.cloudfront.net/publications/tokey_24peeker_2.pdf "Open file in new window")2.78 MB [slides](https://d1qx31qr3h6wln.cloudfront.net/publications/tokey_24peeker_3.pptx "Open file in new window")3.43 MB [demo paper](https://d1qx31qr3h6wln.cloudfront.net/publications/tokey_24peeker_demo_0.pdf "Open file in new window")1.24 MB ## Copyright Copyright by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or . The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library .