Lead Rush: A First-Person Shooter for User Studies and Understanding Effects of Frame Time Spikes
User studies are a cornerstone of human-computer interaction research, including measures of user performance and quality of experience (QoE) - particularly important for games where frame rates and frame timings can impact performance. Unfortunately, commercial games have limited options for customization and do not log player performance data with sufficient detail for use in such studies. This paper introduces Lead Rush, a first-person shooter game designed for conducting user studies on the effects of frame timing and frame rate. Lead Rush is tuned to run at extremely high frame rates and includes hooks to induce frame time "spikes". Researchers can configure Lead Rush's gameplay, trigger frame time spikes during specific actions, and log player data per game round and per study session. This paper also introduces a dataset from a user study on the effects of frame time spikes on player performance gathered from Lead Rush, and includes gameplay logs with both performance data and QoE results. Some analysis of the dataset is presented to illustrate its use.
