FirstPersonScience: An Open Source Tool for Studying FPS Esports Aiming

BSTRACT First-person shooters (FPS) games are dominant in the competitive gaming and esports community. However, relatively few tools are available for experimenters interested in studying mechanics of these games in a controlled, repeatable environment. While other researchers have made progress with one-off applications as well as custom content and mods for existing games, we are not aware of a general purpose application for empirically studying a broad set of user interactions in the FPS context. For the past few years our team has developed, maintained, and deployed First Person Science (FPSci), a tool for controlled user studies in FPS gaming. FPSci experimenters configure their desired base environment, as well as conditions and user preferences using a simplified JSON-esque set of input configurations, and results are stored in an SQLite database. By allowing finer grained parametric control of the environment together with frame-wise logging of player state and performance metrics, we achieve a level of granularity of control not offered by other solutions. FPSci is available as an open source project 1 under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.