Is there a connection between experienced realism, rate of fire and loop length on fully automatic rifles in a first-person shooter game in first-person?

Abstract: This thesis aims to test if there is a connection between modern day fully automatic rifles rate of fire, used loop length in implementation and experienced realism in a first-person shooter game in first-person, fired by the players own character. With a background consisting of papers, books and lectures/conferences given by experienced people and other experts in the game industry regarding first person shooter games, a listening test was conducted and carried out on a computer using headphones with both trained and untrained subjects since players can be both. A simple firing-range was constructed in Unreal Engine 4 (Epic Games, 2017) where the subjects could switch between two weapons with different rates of fire and three versions of each with different loop lengths, 4, 8 and 16. The sounds were divided into layers, e.g. body, mechanical and bottom, played back using looping as implementation. The subjects were also asked to rate the sounds regarding gameplay and preference to see if the results would differ between the three categories. The results showed a tendency to choose the longer loop for all categories, but only four comparisons gave a significant result when doing t-tests.