Studying Esports Competition: Piloting Methodology for User Studies During Tournaments

Designing experiments is a well-studied, complex task with many conflicting constraints. In experimental user studies, the overarching goal is to gain understanding of how a system affects users by manipulating independent variables (eg, an interface's configuration) while measuring dependent variables (eg, the user's performance). Achieving this goal requires significant compromise between many conflicting sub-goals including internal validity, that the effects on dependent variables were caused by manipulations of independent variables, not other uncontrolled variables; external validity, that the findings are generalizable enough to have meaning outside the lab; and feasibility, that the experiment can be performed without unreasonable time and cost.

Authors

Arjun Madhusudan (NC State University and NVIDIA)
Benjamin Watson (NC State University)

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