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”?
A brief explanation; for those of you who aren’t gamers. 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. Pushing with the same stick shows you down, for inverted mode. There is really no science that tells us why some people like to reverse and some people are completely “wrong”, surprisingly.
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. “I learned how to play the reverse in TimeSplitters 2,” one Redditor writes further, “That’s the only reason I still play reverse these days! I thought it wasn’t a specific way to share the experience with others.” 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 experiments. After an interview with the Guardian on the matter, the controversy spread with his colleagues and now Corbett and his colleague Dr. Jap Munneke have decided to find out what is happening.
The team told the Guardian in a separate article, the team will volunteer to mentally rotate the shapes and measure how much they rely on relevant and body signals when they make spatial judgments.
Corbett said, “There are no right or wrong answers to these tasks – we’re interested in how people can perform differently.” “We will take one or two measures from each participant, for example, average response time; average accuracy – in each of the four short computerized online tests, and then combines 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 got 500 applications from gamers to take part in the test, so hopefully, it won’t be too long until they fill in the “gaps” in our knowledge, there may be apps we don’t know yet.
Corbett added, “Understanding these distinctive differences can help us better predict where to store important information and where to double-check for easily missed information from security-critical tasks such as X-ray weapon detection from VR gaming to safety-critical tasks.”
