At the heart of console gaming are two great mysteries: Why are there people who don’t overturn their controllers? And why on earth would the makers of such games label this distorted layout as “normal”?
For those of you who are not gamers, here is a brief explanation. The so-called general layout of a controller is when you push the right analog stick and find your point of view in the game. For inverted mode, pressing with the same stick will make you look down.
Surprisingly, there is really no science that tells us why some people like to flip and some people are completely “wrong”.
Could it be something about the places that different people paint pictures of? Or maybe there is another sensitive process with it. Or as many people on the internet have suggested, it’s just about the games we’ve learned to play.
“I learned how to play upside down in TimeSplitters 2,” one Redditor wrote, “I still play upside down these days because that’s the only reason I thought it wasn’t a specific way to share experiences with others.” From the same era, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark set the controls to reversal by default and this could probably be the account for many people learning the “correct” way of playing. So far, we don’t know, but that could change.
A team led by Dr Jennifer Corbett, co-head of the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London, is looking into the Covid-19’s challenge, forcing them to stop their general experiment. After an interview with the Guardian on the subject, the controversy with his colleagues spread and now Corbett and his colleague Dr. Jap has decided to find out what is happening to Munneke.
The team will provide volunteers with the task of mentally rotating shapes and measuring how much they rely on relevant and physical cues when making spatial judgments, the team told the Guardian in a separate article.
“There’s no right or wrong answer to these tasks – we’re interested in how people can perform differently,” Carpet said. “In each of the four short computerized online tests, we will take from each participant, for example, average response time, average accuracy – one or two measures, and then combine these measures with information on gaming practice questions that each participant will complete.”
The team still does not know what they will find. They’ve received 500 applications from gamers to take part in the lab; so hopefully, it won’t be too long until they fill the “gaps” in our knowledge, which may have applications that we don’t know yet.
“Understanding these distinct differences can help us better guess where to place important information and double-check for easily missed information on safety-critical tasks such as X-ray weapon detection from VR gaming to safety-critical tasks.”Carpet added.
