Assessment of Human Expertise in First-Person Shooter Games

Contrary to traditional professional sports, there are few standardized metrics in professional esports (competitive multiplayer video games) for assessing a players skill and ability. To begin to address this, we assessed the performance of professional-level players in Aim Lab, a first-person shooter training and assessment game, within two separate target-shooting tasks. These tasks differed primarily in the relative incentive for fast and imprecise shots versus slow and precise shots. Each players motor acuity was measured by characterizing the speed-accuracy trade-off in shot behavior: shot frequency and shot spatial error (distance from center of a target). We also characterized the fine-grained kinematics of players mouse movements. Our findings demonstrate that: 1) movement kinematics depended on task demands; and 2) individual differences in motor acuity were significantly correlated with both kinematics and the number of movements needed to hit a target. We demonstrate the importance of transforming from orientation in the virtual environment to centimeters on the mouse pad, as well as accounting for differences in mouse sensitivity across players, for characterizing human performance in first-person shooter games. This approach to measuring motor acuity has widespread application not only in esports assessment and training, but also in basic (motor psychophysics) and clinical (gamified rehabilitation) research.