FPS Game Aim Strategy Analysis
A research project for comprehending player's aiming experience vs. their crosshair pre-placement strategies
2022, Grad Student Researcher, Associated with: Columbia TC Language & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, prof. Peter Gordon
Background
This project is an extension of the review of Eye-Tracking application in Games.
Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty...all of these popular video games share a same tag - First Person Shooter Game. One day when I was playing one of them (I believe it's Overwatch), since we lost the match, someone was calling me a noob who can't aim! 😨😓
Out of outrageous, besides practicing my aim, I questioned myself, "How do the pro-players aim?", "Are them aiming purely based on faster action-reaction time, I mean, intuition? Or there are some tips I didn't know." Out of Curiosity, I connected with some of my friends who are really good at aimming in games. After a fun and short discussion, I did realize that they are not aiming purely based on intuition, but there are some strategies, including pre-aiming and paying more attention on the strategically more valuable places (aka, "choke points"). To discover if these "strategies" are universal or not, I drew eye-tracking, a method I've just learned from an neuroscience course, out of the toolbox. Advised by prof. Peter Gordon who directs the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, a research could potentially both help game makers and gamers better understand the cognitive process behind aiming and to improve my aim skills was carried out.
Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty...all of these popular video games share a same tag - First Person Shooter Game. One day when I was playing one of them (I believe it's Overwatch), since we lost the match, someone was calling me a noob who can't aim! 😨😓
Out of outrageous, besides practicing my aim, I questioned myself, "How do the pro-players aim?", "Are them aiming purely based on faster action-reaction time, I mean, intuition? Or there are some tips I didn't know." Out of Curiosity, I connected with some of my friends who are really good at aimming in games. After a fun and short discussion, I did realize that they are not aiming purely based on intuition, but there are some strategies, including pre-aiming and paying more attention on the strategically more valuable places (aka, "choke points"). To discover if these "strategies" are universal or not, I drew eye-tracking, a method I've just learned from an neuroscience course, out of the toolbox. Advised by prof. Peter Gordon who directs the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, a research could potentially both help game makers and gamers better understand the cognitive process behind aiming and to improve my aim skills was carried out.
Crosshair Pre-Placement
Choke Point
Research Setup
Abstract
Background
Intro
Setup
Stimuli
Results / Data
Heatmap
Data
Analysis
Analysis
Summary
Deliverables
You can find a short research report and a ppt demo, click here.
Future Work
Besides the weaknesses listed in the summary, there are more needed to be conquered, such as, Observer Bias, Experimentor Bias, environmental distractions and turbulence, etc. Moreover, this future research may expand the idea using cognitive-neuroscience methods to interpret the motor skills behind the each aim strategies, in other words, this research did not reveal the facts why these aim strategies are the most effective ones, and while some parameters changed, will they ramain to be effective or not.
Highlights
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