People usually play video games to enjoy their leisure hours or reduce their stress after a hard day at work. While most RPG or story-driven games deliver an enjoyable experience to players, some FPS titles tend to increase players’ stress levels due to the extreme competitiveness. So, the University of Leeds in the UK recently conducted a study to find out the most and least stressful FPS titles in the market, and the results are pretty surprising.
The study, which was commissioned by BetVictor, was conducted on 32 good and expert players of four different FPS titles. The FPS titles included popular battle royale games like Apex Legends, Call of Duty Warzone, PUBG, and Valve’s tactical FPS title Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO).
The researchers measured the heart rate and blood pressure of the players before and after playing the game of their choice. With the acquired data, they created a graphical representation of how the games affected the stress levels of the players. You can check out the average heart rate of players for different titles in the graph below.
So, according to the study, Respawn’s uber-popular battle royale title Apex Legends turned out to be the most stressful for players. The average heart rate of the Apex Legends players was 80.6bpm before playing the game. After playing it, however, the average heart rate increased to 83.1bpm.
Valve’s iconic tactical FPS title CS:GO, on the other hand, turned out to be the least stressful game as the average heart rate of the players decreased from 79.5bpm before playing the game to 77bpm after playing it. This might be due to the fact that CS:GO is a methodical game, much like Riot’s Valorant, that requires players to think. This is unlike Battle Royale titles like COD Warzone, PUBG, or Apex Legends that often put players in high-tension situations.
Now, coming to the stress levels of the players, although all the games decreased the overall stress levels of the players, some of them decreased stress levels more than the others. For instance, the average stress level of a CS:GO player decreased the most, while the average stress level of an Apex Legends player decreased the least. You can check out the overall stress level comparison for the FPS titles in the graph below.
So, with this study, the researchers from the University of Leeds concluded that CS:GO is the least stressful FPS title and Apex Legends is the most stressful one. Hence, if you are an Apex Legends fanatic, we’d suggest you try out other FPS titles in the market that would reduce your stress instead of increasing it. After all, video games are meant to entertain you instead of stressing you out.
