Playing with Delay: With Poor Timing Comes Poor Performance, and Experience Follows Suit

Delays are ever-present in interactive tasks, such as controlling a cursor with a mouse. Unfortunately, perceptible delays are likely to affect both quality of experience and task performance, and even imperceptible delays can potentially be harmful to performance. This paper presents a controlled behavioural experiment that explores the impact of delay on interactions with motor inputs and visual outputs. Because system and network delays interact and overlap, we address total interface delay, focusing on the effect rather than the cause. In the experiment, 51 participants played a simple game of chase-and -catch, using the mouse to intercept a bouncing target. The game includes three levels of difficulty, defined by the speed of the target, with controlled interface delay added between the mouse and the corresponding cursor. The delay values ranged from the system's minimum processing time of 40 ms up to a total of 440 ms. We evaluated participants' game performance, as well as perceived game responsiveness. In line with predictions, our analyses show a negative relation between delay and quality of experience, along with deteriorating performance. In contrast, performance does not co-vary with self-reported game skill. Moreover, an individual's experience with other time-dependent activities has no significant effect on neither performance nor experience, with one exception - musical practice appears to benefit performance for this type of interaction.