Relationship Status: It’s Complicated. Using APM as a QoE-qualifying Tempo Metric

The results of studies investigating the perceived quality of different video games in various environments are often not easy to compare. While one input delay value might be perfectly fine for one game, it might completely break immersion and flow in another. Typically, one would assume that video games can be categorized based on their genre to reach a certain comparability, but that has not proven true in the past. Thus, efforts are made to find new ways of categorization for this issue that are based on objective and quantifiable metrics. In this work, we focus on the merits of Actions per Minute (APM) as one such candidate metric as there is already preliminary usage of the metric for this purpose in the literature. We explore a diverse dataset of real-world DOTA 2 matches and try to understand the characteristics and stability of APM and its relationship to other game-centric and player-centric objective metrics. This is an initial attempt to understand how stable such a metric would be even for just one game in the larger quest to find a suitable cross-game categorization metric. Our exploration has uncovered player-specific influences in the APM. But we are confident that with a narrow, filtered definition of the APM this approach can be used to define APM ranges that resemble the tempo of a game to be used as a basis to classify games for Quality of Experience research.