Howard, EbenCooper, ClintWittie, Mike P.Yang, Qing2014-02-142014-02-142013Eben Howard, Clint Cooper, Mike P. Wittie, Qing Yang. "Cascading Impact of Lag on User Experience in Multiplayer Games," in USENIX NSDI (poster session), 2013https://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/3092Playing cooperative multiplayer games should be fun for everyone involved and part of having fun in games is being able to perform well, be immersed, and stay engaged [13, 17]. These indicators of enjoyment are part of a user's Quality of Experience (QoE), a measure which further includes additional metrics such as attention levels and ability to succeed. Players stop playing the game when it ceases to provide a high enough QoE, especially in cooperative and social games. [8, 18, 19]. Industry application development and current research both operate with the assumption that for any given individual in a group, that individual's QoE is affected only by their own network condition and not the network conditions of the other group members [4, 7, 8]. We show that this assumption is incorrect. Our research shows that the QoE of all group members is negatively affected by a single member's lag (communication delay, or loss caused by poor network conditions). Understanding a user's QoE as a function that includes other users' network conditions has the potential to improve lag mitigation strategies for multiplayer games and other group applications.en-USComputer SciencePresentation