We present a study comparing player performance in a shooter game using two different types of scaling across four display sizes. The first scaling type used uniform scaling where increasing the display size also increased the size of all in-game elements by the same factor. The second employed non-uniform scaling where all in-game elements remained fixed in size, but the game environment increased (or decreased) in size. As expected, gameplay becomes much easier at larger scales with non-uniform scaling. Our results quantify this expectation: different difficulty attributes are very well modeled using either linear or power models. We discuss the implications this has on maintaining constant game difficulty and user experience.
Robert J. Teather, Jacques Carette, and Manivanna Thevathasan. 2015. Uniform vs. non-uniform scaling of shooter games on large displays. In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Games Entertainment Media Conference (GEM 2015). October 14—16, 2015, Toronto, ON, Canada. IEEE, New York, NY, USA, 257-264. https://doi.org/10.1109/GEM.2015.7377210