Scientists to Study People Who Invert their Controls in Games

So here's a fun fact for you: apparently, there's a sizable portion of the population who play with inverted controllers. That is to say, when they move the control stick to the left, their avatar moves to the right. Things like that. The Guardian did a whole piece on it way earlier this year.

And apparently, that article got scientists thinking: why? Why do so many people invert their controls? So, like any group of nerds with nothing better to do, Dr. Jennifer Corbett and Dr. Jaap Munneke, from the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University, London, are planning to find out and have called for volunteers to help them uncover the mystery of why some people prefer inverted controls over others, and what that means for them.

A quote from the former:

“Most research focuses on how people pay attention to individual objects, but humans can’t really process more than a few details at once. There’s a gaping hole in our knowledge regarding how our visual perception is heavily dependent on the rest of this vast majority of sensory information. Being able to predict how a person will interact within a given environment or context can bring about monumental advancements in technology.”

Of course, the real purpose of this experiment isn't to examine video game controller accessibility: rather, they want to find out if brains who prefer inverted controllers have different wiring upstairs and how their unique brains might handle other, less game-related situations.

As the scientist continued to explain:

“Although it’s not per se a topic we’d study in our lab, we had to pause regular EEG and eye-tracking experiments due to Covid and shift to online experiments... this was the perfect opportunity to pursue such a question, especially given how much this has excited the hardcore gamers in our lab.”

Some pretty cool stuff. Personally, I don't know anyone who inverts their controllers, but I'm still pretty interested to see what the results of this study might be. I doubt it'll be revolutionary, but I have high hopes that the cool factor will be up there.