Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Evaluating Performance
A total of 20 participants (19 males, 1 female) took part in this experiment. Of these
participants, 18 were undergraduate students aged between 18-25 years while 2 par-
ticipants were postgraduate students aged between 26-40 years. In the
sound on
con-
dition, players were required to have the in game background music and sounds from
the game turned on. This included voice chat. Participants in the
sound off
condition
were not allowed to have any sounds from the game on and played in complete si-
lence. Other sounds, such as personal music, were not allowed in either of the two
conditions. In both conditions players were allowed to communicate using text based
chat to each. The server selected to host all matches was US west. This server pro-
vided the best possible latency levels for all players based on their Internet connection
speeds. The game mode selected was
all pick
which allows players access to all he-
roes in the game.
We recorded a total of 140 comparative measures (7 performance measures x 5
players x 4 teams) for analyzing individual performance. Of these 82 showed im-
provements in performance when sound is included, 10 showed no difference and 48
displayed a reduction in performance. We collated the individual performance data
further, calculating the average individual results across the 7 measures. Out of these
7 measures, 1 showed a reduction in performance, 6 showed improvements when
sound was present (see table 1). The difference for the measure of 'Hero levels' was
found to be significant.
Table 1.
Average Individual Performance with Sound On and Sound Off
Individual Measure
Sound Off
Sound On
Hero Levels*
17.2
18.6
Hero Kills
6.8
7.1
Hero Deaths
10.8
11.5
7.1
7.4
Kill Assists
12555
13170
Total Gold Earned
312.8
314.8
Gold per Minute
427.9
453.8
Experience Points per Minute
In addition to recording individual performances, we also recorded 16 team meas-
ures in total (4 teams x 4 performance) for measuring team performance. Out of these,
nine showed an increase in performance with sound on while seven showed a de-
crease in performance. We analysed the team performance data further, calculating
the average team results for the three expert teams (see table 2). Out of the 4 meas-
ures, 3 showed improvements in performance when sound is present while only 1
measure recorded a reduction in performance with sound.
