A Comparison of Interactive and Passive Quality Assessment for Gaming Research

Subjective tests to assess the Quality of Experience (QoE) of gaming services are necessary to enable service providers to ensure the satisfaction of their customers. Since gaming is an interactive activity, interactive tests are typically conducted to measure the full spectrum of the player experience. However, carrying out such tests is expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, the results can be influenced by the behavior and abilities of participants. For this reason, it is of high interest whether such interactive tests can be partially replaced with passive viewing-and-listening tests. In this paper, we present a comparison of an interactive gaming test with passive tests using two different durations. To investigate the differences between the test paradigms, we assessed the overall quality, the video quality and the reactiveness of the game as well as other player experience aspect for different frame rates and bit rates. Results show that once certain requirements are fulfilled, passive tests offer indeed a valuable quality assessment method. However, if the duration of the presented video material is too short, the passive test overestimated the gaming and video quality. Furthermore, we show that the player performance has no impact on the video quality ratings.