Research shows that Call of Duty is the most stressful franchise to play, while The Sims is the best for stress relief.
People play video games for any number of reasons -- for entertainment, as a way to escape, out of boredom, the list goes on and on. However, the peculiar thing is that many people go back to video games even if they have a negative impact on their moods. Almost everyone to have ever played a game will have been pushed to the limit of wanting to embed a controller in a TV screen.
That stress is usually brought about by a challenging boss, or being continually bested by a tricky foe online. Comfy Sacks conducted a little research on video game-induced stress. It surveyed more than 1,000 gamers, both casual and hardcore, to try and discover which games induce the most stress, and also how different gamers react to being pushed to the edge by video games.
It turns out Call of Duty is the most stressful franchise to play. Modern Warfare came in first with 47.4% of recipients admitted to getting stressed while playing it. Another CoD title, Black Ops 4, came in at a close second. Fortnite rounded out the top three, which doesn't surprise us in the slightest. Anyone who hasn't had their round ended by a sharp-shooting ten-year old before they've even managed to find any loot hasn't lived.
As for games that encourage stress relief, The Sims tops the list. Of those surveyed, 38.5% admitted to the game having a calming effect on them. Minecraft and Tetris also made the top ten of least stressful games. Maybe it's something to do with building and blocks. Pokémon games also filled three of the top ten spots in the least stressful games category. Makes sense. What's stressful about trying to catch 'em all?
As for how gamers react to being stressed out by a game, the top answer was yelling at a friend. Almost a third of gamers admitted to having broken a controller due to stress brought on by a video game not going their way, and a little less than one in ten even revealed they had broken a console in the past. At the risk of annoying ourselves with what might be the most hated cliché in all of gaming, come on everyone, it's only a game.
Source: Comfy Sacks