You may have seen some pro players sitting with
their face almost touching the screen. And even some who sit very far back from it. Right now,
most of us are likely sitting about an arm’s length from the screen, wondering why these
pla yers have adopted such a radical position. And that’s exactly what i’ll be answering
throughout this video. And believe me, there is more than meets the eye with
this topic. There are some significant implications for your aim, mouse sensitivity,
field of view and even your ability to clutch in stressful situations. While i’ll
mostly be focusing on aiming in FPS games, there are some useful findings
for other genres like Mobas too. The obvious variable that’s being changed when
moving closer or further away from the screen is the size of it in our own field of view, and
subsequently the size of the targets on our screen. Depending on how you measure it, humans
have about 200 degrees field of view horizontally, and 135 degrees vertically. You can see
this for yourself quite easily too. If you were to draw a line horizontally from
your eyes that would be 180 degrees. Yet, when looking forward, you can probably see your
own hand movements from a bit behind that line. To further put this into context, i’m currently
looking at this target dummy in Apex Legends. My eyes are 65 centimeters away. And the target
is 8cm high and 3cm wide. Before I tell you, take a quick guess as to what percentage
of my field of view this target occupies? If your initial guess was anything like mine
was, then you’re way off. It is only 0.069% of my field of view, if we assume it’s a 2d
rectangle, which it isn’t, but it’s close enough to get the idea. If I moved closer so I was 20cm
away, it jumps up to .7%, so almost 1% now. And if I go even closer to 5cm away, it jumps all
the way up to 9.6% of my total field of view. This shows us that the perceived target
size grows exponentially the closer we get to the screen. A 5cm change when you’re
sitting back hardly changes anything, but 5cm when your face is right up near
the screen makes a huge difference. The other piece of this puzzle is the angle of our
eye’s ability to focus. We can only see things in sharp high detail in about 1-2 degrees, known as
foveal vision. This extends out to about 5 degrees becoming progressively less detailed and is known
as parafoveal vision. In this sheet of numbers, when looking at the 8. I can comprehend the 7471
to the right, 1688 to the left, 3 and 3 above, and 0 and 2 below. Anything past that is an educated
guess. The immediate numbers, so the 7, 1, 3 and 0 are very clear, but every number past that
becomes increasingly difficult to accurately see. What’s interesting about this example is
that it can show off how your peripheral vision is used in detecting light. When
looking at the 8, I can still perceive where number 7’s are in particular because
of the extra black background around it. If we go back to the Apex Dummy example, this
foveal vision does a good job of accurately covering the top half of it which means I can
see this target in high detail when sitting about 65 centimeters from the screen. At 10
centimeters it moves into parafoveal and beyond. Being able to see the whole target or
the whole width of a target clearly isn’t necessarily essential, being
able to clearly see the head, or even part of the chest is good enough for aiming
purposes. That is not the conclusion though, this is just some useful groundwork to establish
before moving into the in-game applications. A fascinating component of
your distance to the screen, is how it changes your perception of
mouse sensitivity, and the speed of targets moving on your screen. Check this
out, and you can try this too if you like. Here I am doing some close range flicks to
a target while sitting a bit under my arm’s length from the screen. They’re consistent
and I have a good idea of how far to move my mouse to close that distance. But if
I suddenly move very close to my monitor, I start overaiming the flicks. The distance
between my crosshair and the target is identical, my sensitivity is identical and
despite this, I am now overaiming. What we have changed is the size of the
target and the distance between it and my crosshair within my own field of vision.
Because the distance appears to be larger, I feel like I have to aim further than before.
The exact same thing happens if you change your field of view in-game. If I go from 105 to 80,
I suddenly start overaiming, despite having the exact same cm/360. The opposite also happens
when increasing field of view and/or increasing the distance to the screen. You start to underaim
and feel like your sensitivity is suddenly lower. This is also why we don’t use a cm/360 conversion
for our ADS and zoom. It may seem logical on the surface that you should move your mouse the
same distance for a 360 no matter the zoom, but in practice it doesn’t work. I’ll quickly
explain this using an example I made for a KovaaKs video a while back. At 100 horizontal
field of view, if we move 1 degree to the right, it will move 1/100th of the scene out of view.
And at 1 horizontal FOV, if we move 1 degree, it will move 100% of the scene out of view. So
even if you use the exact same cm/360 for both examples, they will feel wildly different
as the pixels per degree differ greatly. This is precisely why we don’t use a
direct cm/360 conversion for scopes as the change in pixels per degree
can make them feel extremely fast in comparison. This is why scopes have
sensitivity multipliers attached to them. While moving our eyes closer to the screen isn’t
technically changing the game’s pixels per degree, the same principle applies. By moving
closer, the same on-screen movements are suddenly moving objects around our
scene more drastically than before, giving the appearance of things
moving further and faster. You may be thinking that this sounds a bit
back to front. Doesn’t higher FOV usually make things feel faster? Well yes, but that’s
primarily because of the environment warping toward the edges. Around the center things
are just as stable as they would be on a lower FOV. And the center of the screen
is what we care about most when aiming. It’s getting a little outside the scope
of this video but I may as well quickly cover it here. Pros and players alike tend to
play on higher fields of view when available. Most probably put this down to seeing more
information but there’s more to it. Aiming ‘feels’ easier on higher field of view because
of that perceived lower mouse sensitivity. You can think of it like gaining the precision
benefits of low sens, without incurring the physical limitations that come with playing on
low sens. For example, 35cm at 110 FOV in apex, which is equivalent to 123 horizontal FOV, is
starting to feel pretty low, but in a lower FOV game like Overwatch at 103 horizontal FOV,
35cm feels like more of a mid range sens. To best utilize higher FOV’s you want to
avoid that weird warping at the edges. Watch this. At 110 FOV and my typical screen
distance, there’s some warping at the edges, and I can almost see these lines here where it
seems to start. If I move back, the warping gets much worse. When i’m very far back it honestly
looks atrocious. Yet, if I move further forward, it all but disappears from my perception and I
can use max FOV in Apex without feeling nauseous. Alrighty, we have covered a lot of information, so hopefully you’re still with me. Let’s get into
the practical applications of screen distance. One of the most interesting implications in my
opinion is how the distance between your eyes and the screen changes your perception
of mouse sensitivity. In particular, during tense engagements in-game, you
may notice that you gradually move your head closer to the screen. What this means is
that throughout this intense part of the game, you’re essentially raising your mouse sensitivity,
and increasing the perceived speed of enemies moving around on your screen which is the
last thing you need in a time like that. And remember, this effect is exponentially
stronger the closer you are to the screen. If you’re sitting pretty far back then the
impact is mild. But if you’re already close, moving your head forward another 20cm
or so can have a significant impact on your perceived sensitivity and enemy speed. This doesn't mean you shouldn’t sit closer
or that sitting far back is superior, it’s simply worth considering. If you
find any downtime during tense moments, perhaps try to sneak in a quick posture
check to get yourself back in order. In regards to being very close to the monitor.
We tend to see this mostly with Tac-FPS players in Counter Strike and Valorant. In my opinion,
this comes down to the structured and predictable nature of gameplay. There is limited mobility
and with proper awareness and communication, being attacked from behind or the sides
isn’t that common. This means players can opt to put a massive emphasis on target
size and clarity. By sitting so close, enemies are very easy to see
around the center of the screen, and their relative size is very large
so they can feel easier to aim at. This can work because of the fast time to kill, predictable locations of enemies
and limited need for tracking. These players are sacrificing the
information in their peripheral vision for enhanced details around the center. While I can understand the potential benefits
of being so close, it’s not something I would personally recommend doing. The eye strain,
postural issues and reduced situational awareness don’t seem worth it to me. You should be able
to achieve most of the same benefits without incurring so many drawbacks with settling for
a middle-ground at around half arm’s length. To find the distance that works best for you, it’s important to consider that there
isn’t a perfect, one size fits all number, but we can follow some guidelines to
find what works for our circumstances. First, what game are you playing? In my experience
playing on a 24.5 inch monitor, I tend to play most games at a bit under arms length from
the screen, which for me with my head forward a little, is about 55cm. In FPS games where enemy
size is important, so battle royales like PUBG and Apex, I tend to use a closer setup around 45-55cm.
In a game like Overwatch where engagements are fairly close and targets are bright and visible,
a more comfortable 55cm works just fine. In Mobas like Heroes of the Storm,
where information toward the edges of the screen is very important, I find
myself moving the monitor back so i’d be playing at about 60-65cm. Any closer and
gameplay can start to feel claustrophobic, where the important edges of my screen and of
battles can feel undefined and hard to track. The same goes for games like World of Warcraft,
where UI elements provide crucial information, so being able to comfortably see the screen without
needing massive eye movements is beneficial. My recommendation would be to experiment
with your distances in some throwaway games, or by watching high resolution VODs of that
game (if the quality is too low you may move closer to compensate which isn’t a fair test).
The idea is to experience what differences you notice and where the sweet spot between comfort
and detail sits for you. Keeping in mind that if you are playing the game while testing, that
your perceived mouse sensitivity and target speed will be changing, so try not to judge this
based on your performance alone. You’re looking for the image size that feels best to look
at in your game, performance can come later. If you do end up changing your screen distance,
whether that’s further forward or backwards, give yourself some time to adjust to it and
get comfortable with your settings again. You may want to adjust your sensitivity slightly.
So if you moved closer, you could lower it, and if you moved further away you
could increase it. Not by much, you’d just be looking to make it feel the
way it did before you changed that distance. And finally, your ergonomics and health
matter. Sitting at a desk for hours on end is bad enough as it is, without throwing
in complications from forward head posture or eye strain. So my advice is to keep that
distance reasonable and sustainable. Also, try to line up your eyes with the top third
of your monitor to reduce neck and eye strain. This has been a topic i’ve wanted
to cover for quite awhile now, there is so much nuance to it that I wanted to
get into so hopefully the information dump wasn’t too much or too boring. Let me know if you’d
like to see more in-depth videos like this one, or if I should try to keep them shorter
and focus on the answers and conclusions. You can check out the ClawMate mouse mod
I designed over at StruthGamingGear.com. Video all about how it works right
here. Thanks so much for watching, be sure to subscribe for more content like
this, and i’ll catch you in the next one.
