High-Skilled First-Person Shooter Game Players Have Superior Situation-Based Gaze Control Abilities: Perspectives From the Actual and Controlled Gaming Environment

This study investigated the gaze movements of first-person shooter (FPS) gamers in controlled and actual game environments. In Experiment 1, 16 middle-skilled and 16 high-skilled FPS gamers performed a task under controlled conditions (AimLab). As a result, high-skilled FPS gamers exhibited a faster reaction and narrow gaze distribution than middle-skilled, which represents superior performance and high attention. Furthermore, fast reaction was correlated with narrow gaze distribution, suggesting that narrow gaze distribution related to high attention was associated with higher game performance when it was necessary to focus on a single piece of information. In Experiment 2, 19 middle-skilled and 17 high-skilled FPS gamers performed FPS game (Valorant). The results showed that the Kill/Death/Assist score was positively associated with focusing on the mini-map area that represents the overall flow of the game. Moreover, high-skilled FPS gamers had a wider gaze distribution than middle-skilled FPS gamers when it was necessary to focus on the various information simultaneously. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 results suggest that superior gaze control ability based on the game situation was required to achieve high performance in the FPS game. In future, developing training methods based on gaze movements might contribute to improving the FPS gamers’ performance.