An evaluation of the impact of game genre on user experience in cloud gaming

Cloud gaming, in which the processing power of a datacenter-based infrastructure is utilized versus local resources, is a popular topic in research. This technology is successfully applied by vendors to enable low-end hardware to deliver a similar gameplay experience to state of the art consoles. Many works in literature have focused on the quantitative aspects of the technology (i.e. delay measurements, visual quality determination etc), but the qualitative factors have not received a similar systematic treatment. Games are typically classified in terms of their gameplay into a distinct category or genre, including action, puzzle, strategy and racing games. In this work, a qualitative comparison of these genres is presented based on a common testing methodology which combines both objective (based on physiological measurements) and subjective (based on user evaluation) approaches. While in normal networked games, only multiplayer experiences are subject to the detrimental effect of delay, the nature of cloud gaming may result in an impact on singleplayer experiences as well. Results from this analysis hint at the fact that there is a similarity in delay-sensitiveness over the different genres in both singleplayer cloud gaming setups and traditional networked multiplayer games. More in particular, results show that action-oriented games are more sensitive to network delay in both setups when compared to other genres.