The present study examined whether habitual interaction with violent video games would result in hostile emotional processing among players. A total of 42 adult students participated in the experiment. They were categorized as habitual violent video gamers (HVVGs; n = 21, Mage = 20.09 years, SD = 0.89) and non-video gamers (NVGs; n = 21, Mage = 21.66 years, SD = 2.01). Participants completed an emotional go/no-go task that required them to recognize facial expressions of happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. Results indicated that HVVGs outperformed NVGs in the emotion recognition task, demonstrating higher response accuracy and faster reaction times. Overall recognition capacity was superior for happiness than for the negative emotions across the groups. Fixation metrics corroborated this pattern. Participants showed shorter times to first fixation in the mouth region when recognizing happiness, along with longer first- and total-fixation durations. This consistent gaze pattern suggests greater perceptual salience of happiness on a specified facial region, contributing to its recognition advantage. In contrast, recognition of negative emotions showed a scattered gaze pattern, indicating weaker diagnostic cues in specific facial regions, rather than reflecting an emotional desensitization. Overall, the study calls into question the General Aggression Model's assertion that habitual violent video gaming induces hostile emotional processing. It also cautions against attributing such processing primarily to violent video gaming alone. Instead, the findings emphasize the importance of accounting for broader dispositional and environmental factors when explaining hostile emotional information processing in violent video gamers.