Like with the mouse scroll wheel, there is a reasonable logic to both directions, including whichever direction you don't like.
It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)
It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)
Both of these are natural and everyone does both in real life totally automatically without thinking.
Everyone looks up and down. Everyone grabs objects and moves them to bring different parts into view.
Probably the preference differences are based on a subconscious/unconscious difference in how you imagine yourself in relation to a document. Whether you imagine yourself as being larger than the document like a person vs a paper, you move the paper, or you imagine the document as larger than you like a fly flying over a paper or like you are virtually IN the document, you move yourself.
> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)
> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)
I use opposite directions on my trackpad and my scrollwheel, take that! Ha!
Trackpad I’m grabbing with my fingers so I want the surface to move in the same direction as my fingers.
Scrollwheel I feel like is a roller that sits on top of the surface so I have to roll down to make the surface move up.
Unfortunately, at least in macos, you need 3rd party software to achieve this
I've always set controls like an airplane stick - "pull back" to look up, "push forward" to look down. And could never get the hang of the opposite mapping. It literally never occurred to me that it was like aiming your physical eyes up and down. Sigh.
Airplane controls are somewhat of a hybrid between regular controls and inverted controls. Since you do indeed input up to look down and vice versa, but you still input left to turn left and right to turn right.
Isn’t that how inverted joystick controls in modern video games work too? It’s only the Y axis that’s inverted, I thought (and only the “viewing angle” joystick, not the “player movement” joystick).
Airplane stick is actually consistent but in a different way. The stick always rotates the plane around it's center in the direction the stick is moved.
It's an example of "move the object" instead of "move the observer", in that the goal is to control a vehicle not to control the view in the windshield. And the "object" you're "grabbing" is only rotating the vehicle around it's center, not panning around a flat surface.
I recently rented a paddleboat with an extra linkage to invert the rudder control. I was a mess out on the water! But maybe it made it easier for those with no boat experience.
Reminds me of those couple of guys who made a bicycle with backwards controls. They learned how to use it, which then rendered then unable to use normal bicycles lol.
Yes, it's exactly this - and not even a joystick thing. The control is forward and backwards, not up and down, like pushing the top of your head forward to look down. This mapping makes it act like the other controls, controlling the character directly instead of the viewport independently. Even in third person, I can't help but think of controlling the camera as a camera in this same way, instead of a controlling a viewport.
people underestimate brains "self correction ability".
I use slingshot, unlike gun's sight post slingshots do not have any sight in center of projectile path, basically you eye one of the fork's of slingshot and your brain quickly adjusts to it correcting whatever angle deviation is there.
I can shoot stuff in air without even aiming now, i got so good no sight nothing.
Reminds me of playing Tribes. First start playing, can't hit anything ever because things move too fast and your brain doesn't get the physics. But then you're hitting stuff zipping around at crazy speeds by just kinda intuiting.
Guess we're evolved to throw spears, so we're good at that kind of thing.
This is why I have little patience with people who over do the drama of something being impossible and unnatural. I have my prefferences too but it's just a preference. There is no natural. Humans are ambi-everything. What part of nature is typing 100wpm on qwerty?
And given how both mental models are reasonable, I think a lot of the preference is going to come down to what you're used to.
For me it seems to be tied to muscle memory too? Because I've noticed that when I play using a Gamecube controller I prefer the camera's x-axis to be inverted, but when I play using a modern controller I prefer not inverting it.
> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)
> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)
Except that neither of those is the reason you'd want inverted controls. You want inverted controls because you have to lean back to look up. The model is that the control moves you.
1. We don't push the joystick up or down. We push forward or pull backward. Our control devices are usually on a plane approximately parallel to the ground. Therefore, we push forward or pull backward.
2. Despite the flawed #1, the default being "push forward" = "go down", and thus providing an Invert Y option, is contrary to how our most natural up/down system works - our head. Our head is mounted on a pivot below it (the neck). Pushing the head forward is generally how we look down, and pulling back makes us look up.
Joysticks and game controllers are also mounted with the pivot at the bottom and some length above. If you imagine the joystick like our head, the forward/outward facing edge would be like our eyes. Push the stick forward, and the eyes are now rotated forward and downward. Pull the stick back, and now they are "looking upward".
I think this is pedantic to the point of ironically making your counterargument quite flawed.
The directions you are talking about are actually referred to as "up" and "down" in input parlance (not as "forward" and "backward"), and it seems rather obvious that that's how/why the article is using those terms. This isn't even a gaming or controller specific thing - the similar arrow keys are also called Arrow Up and Arrow Down, not Arrow Forward and Arrow Backward, despite your keyboard actually typically being on a plane parallel to the ground.
I used to get a bunch of grief from my friends about being a look-inverted sort of person. I got the last laugh when I rented a front-loader for a landscaping project and they all wanted to drive it but nobody but me could be efficient with it because stick-back=scoop-up was the only option.
I don't know why we felt like a landscaping tool made look inversion legitimate where everything else was I-will-die-on-this-hill indignance, but it did.
That sounds like you're visualizing the lever being on your side of a pivot point, so when you push it down the other side goes up. Feels natural enough to me!
If the lever is on your side of the pivot point, you'd have to invert both horizontal and vertical axes. I don't have any data, but I certainly don't know anyone who plays with both axes inverted (in first person games).
I sometimes do if the camera is far enough back that I feel like I'm controlling it as it zooms around the character's head. Maybe that makes it not first person, idk.
> What they discovered through the cognitive testing was that a lot of assumptions being made around controller preferences were wrong. “None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted,” says Corbett. “It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.” So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. “Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”
“Simon Effect” is where you are slower to react with the right hand button when the object is displayed on the left and vice versa.
So, slow to rotate or react is more accurate? I feel like I need to understand more here, as this seems like an important brain difference. I’m an inverted player, assumed it was because of MS Flight Sim (1st game), can rotate really well, but am probably very slow at it! Would love to know more!
Edit: I know that I am very slow to overcome the “Simon Effect”, having done this sort of testing in the past. I’d be curious if others experience the same. Perhaps there is more going on than just inverted vs not being something “innate”, whereby the inverted player simply struggles to adapt to a new scheme more and hence has stuck with it.
>Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more
Being faster than your opponent is often an advantage in multiplayer games, so I don't think it's fake to ignore the speed of answers for measuring how good a gamer is.
Being faster on a lab-administered test doesn’t tell you anything about your game-playing ability. This research was focused on determining why people invert their controls, nothing more.
> In short, gamers think they are an inverter or a non-inverter because of how they were first exposed to game controls. Someone who played a lot of flight sims in the 1980s may have unconsciously taught themselves to invert and now they consider that their innate preference; alternatively a gamer who grew up in the 2000s, when non-inverted controls became prevalent may think they are naturally a non-inverter. However, cognitive tests suggest otherwise. It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space.
The research didn't study that so we can't draw any conclusions about the effects of playing flight sims in the 80s on human perception of objects in 3D space.
The right decision executed with bad timing is worse than the right decision executed with good timing. Games are played in real time, this isn't about post game analysis.
The assumption is that it correlates with the speed of other spatial tasks. Being able to predict the future of yourself and other players in how they are moving within the environment is useful for fps games.
That’s your assumption, and if it were true there wouldn’t have been top level quake players who used inverted. Yet there are. I don’t think one follows the other.
To me it's more likely that those are outliers of the trend. Pros themselves are outliers, so I think it would be better to look at the average players.
You've never heard of the term inverted before the article? Don't most games ask if you want normal or inverted controls in the settings, so do you not play games often?
When I was a kid, all the controls by default were what is now called "inverted Y-axis" and rarely had an option to change it. I think it flipped around the 2010s, I remember being confused when I bought my Switch and got back into gaming.
Yeah, back in the day there's games I'd play with a joystick vs those with a mouse, and I always invert/airplane for joystick controls and non invert for mouse. Anecdotally that was common in my cohort.
I think a big part of it, historically, is that this control scheme provides negative feedback, which may help stabilize the controls.
Think about the inertia of the pilot and their limbs inside the plane, acting on the controls. A sudden acceleration/jerk in the direction of the control signal will bias the operator's body to input the opposite control signal unless they are tensed up and prepared to maintain it in spite of the forces they experience.
If the nose pitches up suddenly, you're likely to push the yoke forward. If it pitches down suddenly, you're likely to pull back a bit. Similarly, if the plane (or boat) jerks forward, you are more likely to pull back on the throttle than push it forward. A sudden airplane roll will bias you to input the opposite aileron signal.
Even in a car, if you are holding the top half of the wheel as in the classic 10-and-2 grip, a sudden turn will cause you to counter steer a bit as you experience the centripetal force effect pulling you towards the outside of the turn.
If the controls were inverted, all these default inputs would instead cause positive feedback and seem more likely to send a vehicle out of control.
I think it is because your lever to control the plane does not go up or down but forward and back. and then you pitch the lever the same way you want to pitch the plane. forward to pitch forward and back to pitch back.
Same reason throttles are pushed forward to go faster and backwards to go slower. Except on bulldozers, which have a deaccelerator for some reason. and game controller shoulder levers for ergonomic reasons.
I think if the lever were mounted up and down they(the wright brothers) probably would have wired it to pitch the plane up and down. I am not sure why it was not mounted up and down, probably a combination of arm strength, ergonomics of movement and simplicity of mechanical design.
It would be interesting to see if left handers and right handers differ on this. I can adapt to any scheme with basically zero mental effort, and I've heard this is common in lefties (as I am). Stuff like "hold this up to a mirror for answer" never worked for me because I could read a whole page like that without noticing it's backwards. Da Vinci certainly had it with his inverted notebooks
Red Faction: Armageddon uses a clever method to set your inversion preference: w hen you first enter the game, it asks you to look up and then adjusts the controls based on that instinctive input.
I don't remember if this was the game or not, but I tend to set the settings ahead of time, and I specifically recall a game getting to this sort of in-game mechanic of look up/ look down and reversing the setting I had previously set because it assumed I didn't already choose what I wanted (e.g. it re-inverted my reverted settings back to "normal").
You can switch between the two easily by imagining a lever on the back of the characters head vs front of their head - press up to push the lever higher for the back vs lower for the front. Same goes for planes etc
That works for up and down. But what about side to side? I don't know anyone who inverts left/right. If the lever was at the back of the head, won't left/right be inverted too?
Put your finger on top of the character's head. Left and right are still left and right, but forward (up on the controls because of how they're positioned) makes the character look down and backward makes the character look up.
~20 years ago on Xbox360 we could set this as a system-wide preference. Now in 2025 for every game with camera/first-person control I play on any platform it's time to:
1. hope there's an invert option (not always!)
2. find an opportunity to change it (can't always do so before starting the game, nothing loses immersion like waiting for a cutscene to finish then immediately spending time hunting through a menu)
3. actually find it (will it be under gameplay? controls? somewhere else entirely)
Bonus: if it's a game with "grab the drawer then pull with the thumbstick to open it" mechanics, hope that they remembered to invert those too
Bonus 2: repeat the above for turning off controller vibration, which was also a global preference on the 360.
PC bonus: hope that the option does _not_ affect the mouse (I sometimes switch to mouse+kbd or mouse+controller, I never want to invert my mouse)
Yes, some games present the main brightness/control/etc. options when you begin a new save - but I don't know that's about to happen so have already spent the time hunting in the options menu...
Agreed with others it's just what you're used to. I was inverted-y for most of my gaming life because I started with flight sims where it was mandatory, reflecting the real life hardware. So I used the same in FPS games when they came around. Decades later I had kids and had to spend some time sharing a mouse with them, and didn't want to condemn them to a life of having to look for "inverted Y axis" in the settings of every game (+1 to the post above who requested an OS-level setting for this!), so I left it on the default in Minecraft and learned the other way. Now I'm actually bilingual and can swap from one to the other with about 2 minutes warm up time. This is the same as what happens with driving on the left/right side of the road if you spend a lot of time in different countries driving.
With my kids I drew the grumpy line at Minecraft's new Autojump setting tho ... They had to learn with that disabled.
I'm pretty sure it was done on the first one, Halo CE for the original Xbox. The last times I've played it have been coop in the MCC though which skips that part.
Keeping the stick in a vertical position will automatically correct flight path changes of the airplane caused by external forces. Basically a very primitive form of autopilot.
PS: it's in video 5 (Stability and Control) around timestamp 16:00
I like them inverted for ships/vehicles but not for first person cameras, if that makes any sense. Surely I'm not alone?
I think the difference here is that I think of the vehicles as being parallel to a horizontal plane whereas people are normally standing up so perpendicular. Hitting "up" means different things across those two scenarios.
We were playing CoD zombies with my father in law the other day, and he was really struggling with the overall concept of the two joysticks for moving and looking. I realised he was consistently expecting the joystick to go the opposite way (up/down) compared to what it was actually doing. I said you have to push up to look up.
I remembered he flies Airbuses for a living, and they use a joystick, where pulling back/down is looking up. I inverted the controls and he immediately found it a lot easier to use.
There's a classic experiment of which variations have been done for almost a century now. Put on goggles that use mirrors to flip vision upside down. People adjust much faster than one might think. Minutes to hours. Those who have worn them for multiple days report that the world stops looking upside down with them. Wear them long enough and the world looks upside down when they're taken off.
Played flight simulator with a controller and invert on a controller for any 3D game. Don't invert with a mouse and keyboard on a computer. For me, preference was based on gaming experience.
Er, that's not how flight sims work. Moving your joystick "left" rolls left. To "point left", you push your joystick left and then down and then back right (roll, pitch, roll). The model is totally different.
That very much depends on the game. I cut my teeth on the X-Wing games, where the x axis was for yaw, not roll. To roll you would hold down the top joystick button and move the stick left/right. As a result, to this day I have to remap any game which puts roll on the x axis. It just feels wrong.
I invert (Clair Obscur most recently) because I'm controlling the camera. If I want to look to the left, the camera has to move to the right. I can't play third-person any other way and I have tried!
GP is talking about third person perspective games. "You" (the character you're playing) aren't the camera. You are the character the camera points to.
The camera is hovering somewhere above/behind the player character. To move the field of view left while keeping the player centered in the FOV, the camera has to translate/orbit right.
You each view the world differently, and neither of you are right or wrong. I had to learn spherical astronomy to get the East/West flips on basic up-facing first-person charts correct, and I have to invert differently for first- and third-person views in video games. Not to mention the nightmare of how camera independent axes controls sometimes swap “left” and “right” rotation on the Q and E keys because game designers assume that their mental model of CW and CCW inputs is universal across all players and each game has a coin flip chance of being different from the next. It most definitely is not! (Do you slew the camera from the direction, or do you pivot the camera to the direction?)
Interesting conclusion. My wife struggles with controls in 3d games and is notably not a shape-rotator, but she is a great illustrator. On the other hand, I can assemble ikea blindfolded, but cannot even approximate a human form on paper. Maybe she should try inverted.
I really feel like the result regarding "non inverters were faster" probably won't replicate and was just this group of researchers needing to produce some kind of tangible result from their research. It just doesn't add up.
I don't play video games but I invert the trackpad scroll direction on macOS. I cannot understand people who use the default "natural" scrolling, it's anything but natural, and it's baffling that it's the default.
I once had an Apple fanboy explain to me at excruciating length that my preference was actually factually and objectively wrong, and that everyone should use the macOS scrolling and that anyone who doesn't is just stupid. I do not miss the Apple fanboys.
Huh. I always thought it was far simpler: back in the day we loved flight sims and joysticks. Then our D-pad console controllers got joysticks. So naturally the devs went with what they knew. The rest is just inertia.
I REALLY wish this was a setting I could set once on my computer and ALL games respected it. I prefer inverted X and Y but there’s SO many games out there that just don’t provide this as a setting. I’ve tried playing with non-inverted but I end up just getting frustrated and stopping.
This is how my brain works too. The joystick is the head and my thumb is on top. I pull back to make the little joystick man look up, and push forward to look down.
Edit to add:
>It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.
This tracks with me. I feel like games that require quick multi-dimensional movements (FPS includes) I'm dreadfully slow at. Especially if the game doesn't have the one control setup that my brain prefers, which many don't.
To me, the y axis in the controller is forward, not up. So push head forward to look down. There's no rotation on most joysticks, so there's no 1-to-1 comparison between the two.
I like my right x-axis to be strafing and my left x-axis to be turning, which makes turning while walking way more natural to me.
When I got my first Xbox, I had hell playing Halo and Call of Duty, until I found the look inversion in settings.
I immediately got better at playing. My friends hated it when I came over to play on their console because I always screwed with their controller settings.
Look inversion always felt natural. I never played flight simulators either. It must have been something I got used to on an arcade game in the 80's. I have no clue what game it could have been though. I wish I had all those quarters back.
> “It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.” So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. “Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”
> In short, gamers think they are an inverter or a non-inverter because of how they were first exposed to game controls. Someone who played a lot of flight sims in the 1980s may have unconsciously taught themselves to invert and now they consider that their innate preference; alternatively a gamer who grew up in the 2000s, when non-inverted controls became prevalent may think they are naturally a non-inverter. However, cognitive tests suggest otherwise. It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space.
Or maybe it is the opposite: playing frequently with (non-)inverted controls makes you better at the kind of games they made the subjects play in this test. This article does a very poor job convincing me that their thesis is correct.
My personal experience is that I never played a 3D game with a controller until a couple of years ago (I am 31). Always keyboars and mouse now. When I started, my girlfriend asked me if I preferred normal controls. I was equally terrible with either, so we stuck to whatever she prefers (both axes inverted). I have a very hard time believing that this is not just a matter of practice.
That's true. I used to think I was mentally modeling the input as dragging a joystick on the back of the character's head, but it doesn't quite work if you are looking left and right. Now I wonder if it's a lot more subconscious and the "model" explanation is just a rationalization that feels right.
Maybe it's like how some people feel more natural goofy foot on a skateboard/snowboard than the regular way, regardless of their handedness.
The word "mirrors" seems unfortunate here... But yeah, imagine a giant thumb on your head, to make your head look to the sky, the thumb has to pull it backwards.
I used to invert them but realized two things: 1: anyone can adapt to any control scheme given enough time (which isn't much) 2: majority of games default to, and people play with, non inverted controls. If you don't see yourself playing flight sims constantl y, it's just easier for everyone involved to learn the noninverted controls so that no one has to constantly change control mappings
Disclosure: Didn’t read. But I did always get heckled at gatherings for inverting my controls, and then forgetting to switch them back. I think it came from whatever console you started with first (Sega Saturn), if you played early PC joystick games (Tie Fighter!), and Goldeneye’s Solitare configuration, which allowed deadly accuracy without needing to invoke the crosshairs.
This is specifically mentioned in the article as the common reason given, but that it is wrong. People think this is why, but then they study them and it’s an innate difference.
It's not as simple as whatever this article says. I can play inverted and regulary and have played games throughout my life in both ways. So it's not simply an "innate" difference.
It's preference, and people can easily learn the difference if they played for 10 mins. It's easy to get used to.
Not a gamer as such apart from "I've played some computer games at some points in my life". I don't know about the current generation(s!) of gamers, but in DN3D and Quake when "mouselook" was first added, the default was what "inverted" as in forward = aim down. Then "invert mouse" was added that made it "normal". I did very little flight sims but I played quake, Q2, Q3 and Half-Life this way (forward=down), possibly also HL2 and I can't remember why, then I switched. My best friend from school also played this way. I honestly don't remember how it started; I always thought it was because that's how I first played.
As someone who prefers plane-style controls, I would say that have a rather hard time mentally rotating 3D controls. I suppose that's what the article would call 'inverted controls', but the description is terrible: 'push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down'. A better description would be 'move the right analogue stick back in order to make the camera face down'.
Regardless, if motorcycle-style controls (forward to point the camera up) would make me faster but less accurate then I'm not interested. I'm the type to prioritise accuracy over speed.
I'm not surprised. I have introduced several people to gaming, both adults and children. I let them all start with the default settings, and I don't even tell them there are settings. Then I observe their movements. I observe whether they consistently (or very often) start looking the wrong way before correcting. If they do that a lot, I change the settings, and it's smooth sailing from there.
So from my anecdotal perspective, explanations based on previous experience make no sense. It had to be something more innate, more related to how our brains are "wired".
Some people invert Y but not X. This is the most surprising to me. Most I've seen invert both. I don't remember having seen someone invert X but not Y.
Personally I invert both, except for games with a mouse to aim (like 3rd person shooters). In that case I invert neither. Go figure.
> Some people invert Y but not X. This is the most surprising to me. Most I've seen invert both. I don't remember having seen someone invert X but not Y.
Interesting, because I've never seen someone invert X. They either invert Y, or neither. Personally I invert Y only in flight games, anything else feels wrong to me.
What are you referring to? Inverting scroll wheel direction in macOS is trivial (and one of the first things I change), you just uncheck the "natural scrolling" checkbox.
I play games but not that often. What I find puzzling is that whenever I start out in a new first-person perspective game, it takes me a while to even figure out something’s wrong. I can play uninverted-Y just about well enough to not immediately notice.
Rationally, I know I want invert-Y turned on and I know it’s probably off by default, but for the life of me it takes a good few minutes to figure out that the controls aren’t quite right and something needs changing.
It’s like being able to eat with inverted fork and knife just well enough that it takes a while to notice something is wrong.
Seems super light on details, I guess I'm supposed to read the paper that's not linked? Not sure why this has to be new journalist and scientific research, couldn't you just ask Microsoft for some Halo stats and call it a day?
I am somewhat weird among my peers in this respect: I invert Y on joystick controls only (and leave it as default for mouse controls). Probably there are other people who do this - it certainly makes sense to me - but almost everyone else (invert-Y or not) seems to find this odd when I actually discuss it.
It didn't super matter until I started using a steam deck, which has both joysticks and touchpads. I usually need to reverse one or the other in the steam controller mapping, since few games let you configure invert-Y separately for different input devices.
I will never understand these people who invert their camera controls, especially in something like Dark Souls. You are playing as a knight not an airplane.
Inverted x and y has always made sense to me; I think of controlling a camera on a gimbal, so to look to the right the camera needs to swing to the left
Id like to know why so many, if not all in my experience, early 3D games were inverted by default? If regular style appears to be considerably more common how did that avoid being the standard?
The notion of splits in vim and tmux and inverted. I.e., what vim calls vertical split is what tmux calls horizontal split. As a life-long vimmer, naturally, I'm in the vim camp.
I specifically prefer inverted controls in third person (tilting the stick up moves the camera up, so to point at the character it must then tilt the view down), but non-inverted controls in first person (tilting up points my view up).
Of course for those who learned the "correct" controls from aviation, the real question is why planes have the stick "inverted" and how that tradition started.
I suspect it is to prevent cascading mistakes. In aviation the controls move in the opposite way of the shift from the current vector of the pilot, that way, if you bump the control, you’re not moved in the direction to exaggerate the mistake.
"Inverted" is definitely correct for flight sims and (probably) third person games, but is less obvious for first person where you are moving a reticle.
Because motion along the x-axis (left-right) is a body rotation about the gravity vector. y-axis motion is not.
We are upright beings in a gravitational field, so if we see a berry to the left of our visual field, we turn our whole body to face it. Then we walk towards it. We do this from a first person vantage only. We don't see our own backs - just the world itself.
But if a berry is above our visual field, we can't rotate our body that way. That would make us fall over. We instead remain vertical to gravity and rotate a third-person thing. We tilt something else like an arm or stick in the direction. We see this from a third-person vantage only. We see the back of the arm, or back of the stick. If the berry is up high, the part of the stick closer to us is down low. We see the inverted end moving, so it becomes intuitive. Of course, you can focus on the far end of the stick and get a non-inverted intuition too. But this is only possible from a third-person view which we don't often get when our bodies so easily rotate about the gravity vector.
Like with the mouse scroll wheel, there is a reasonable logic to both directions, including whichever direction you don't like.
It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)
It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)
Both of these are natural and everyone does both in real life totally automatically without thinking.
Everyone looks up and down. Everyone grabs objects and moves them to bring different parts into view.
Probably the preference differences are based on a subconscious/unconscious difference in how you imagine yourself in relation to a document. Whether you imagine yourself as being larger than the document like a person vs a paper, you move the paper, or you imagine the document as larger than you like a fly flying over a paper or like you are virtually IN the document, you move yourself.
> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)
> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)
I use opposite directions on my trackpad and my scrollwheel, take that! Ha!
Trackpad I’m grabbing with my fingers so I want the surface to move in the same direction as my fingers.
Scrollwheel I feel like is a roller that sits on top of the surface so I have to roll down to make the surface move up.
Unfortunately, at least in macos, you need 3rd party software to achieve this
My partner has his stuff set up exactly opposite from you!
I've always set controls like an airplane stick - "pull back" to look up, "push forward" to look down. And could never get the hang of the opposite mapping. It literally never occurred to me that it was like aiming your physical eyes up and down. Sigh.
Airplane controls are somewhat of a hybrid between regular controls and inverted controls. Since you do indeed input up to look down and vice versa, but you still input left to turn left and right to turn right.
Isn’t that how inverted joystick controls in modern video games work too? It’s only the Y axis that’s inverted, I thought (and only the “viewing angle” joystick, not the “player movement” joystick).
Many modern games allow one to invert either the Y or X axis or both. Some players do both.
Airplane stick is actually consistent but in a different way. The stick always rotates the plane around it's center in the direction the stick is moved.
It's an example of "move the object" instead of "move the observer", in that the goal is to control a vehicle not to control the view in the windshield. And the "object" you're "grabbing" is only rotating the vehicle around it's center, not panning around a flat surface.
Fully inverted: ‘Like an airplane for up/down, like a yacht for left/right’
A yacht can have a tiller you push right to go left, or a wheel you rotate clockwise to go right.
I recently rented a paddleboat with an extra linkage to invert the rudder control. I was a mess out on the water! But maybe it made it easier for those with no boat experience.
Reminds me of those couple of guys who made a bicycle with backwards controls. They learned how to use it, which then rendered then unable to use normal bicycles lol.
https://youtu.be/MFzDaBzBlL0
Yes, it's exactly this - and not even a joystick thing. The control is forward and backwards, not up and down, like pushing the top of your head forward to look down. This mapping makes it act like the other controls, controlling the character directly instead of the viewport independently. Even in third person, I can't help but think of controlling the camera as a camera in this same way, instead of a controlling a viewport.
I started with airplane style. Then after few years I had one game that had only the opposite controls so I switched and never looked back.
people underestimate brains "self correction ability".
I use slingshot, unlike gun's sight post slingshots do not have any sight in center of projectile path, basically you eye one of the fork's of slingshot and your brain quickly adjusts to it correcting whatever angle deviation is there.
I can shoot stuff in air without even aiming now, i got so good no sight nothing.
Reminds me of playing Tribes. First start playing, can't hit anything ever because things move too fast and your brain doesn't get the physics. But then you're hitting stuff zipping around at crazy speeds by just kinda intuiting.
Guess we're evolved to throw spears, so we're good at that kind of thing.
This is why I have little patience with people who over do the drama of something being impossible and unnatural. I have my prefferences too but it's just a preference. There is no natural. Humans are ambi-everything. What part of nature is typing 100wpm on qwerty?
And given how both mental models are reasonable, I think a lot of the preference is going to come down to what you're used to.
For me it seems to be tied to muscle memory too? Because I've noticed that when I play using a Gamecube controller I prefer the camera's x-axis to be inverted, but when I play using a modern controller I prefer not inverting it.
> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object.
I sort of picture my hand on the crown of my player models head and my movements move his skull around.
> It's reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the observer. (move a control up to aim your eyes up)
> It's also reasonable and natural to have a mental model that the control moves the object. (move a control down to "grab" the object and move it down)
Except that neither of those is the reason you'd want inverted controls. You want inverted controls because you have to lean back to look up. The model is that the control moves you.
The two main premises here are flawed.
1. We don't push the joystick up or down. We push forward or pull backward. Our control devices are usually on a plane approximately parallel to the ground. Therefore, we push forward or pull backward.
2. Despite the flawed #1, the default being "push forward" = "go down", and thus providing an Invert Y option, is contrary to how our most natural up/down system works - our head. Our head is mounted on a pivot below it (the neck). Pushing the head forward is generally how we look down, and pulling back makes us look up.
Joysticks and game controllers are also mounted with the pivot at the bottom and some length above. If you imagine the joystick like our head, the forward/outward facing edge would be like our eyes. Push the stick forward, and the eyes are now rotated forward and downward. Pull the stick back, and now they are "looking upward".
I think this is pedantic to the point of ironically making your counterargument quite flawed.
The directions you are talking about are actually referred to as "up" and "down" in input parlance (not as "forward" and "backward"), and it seems rather obvious that that's how/why the article is using those terms. This isn't even a gaming or controller specific thing - the similar arrow keys are also called Arrow Up and Arrow Down, not Arrow Forward and Arrow Backward, despite your keyboard actually typically being on a plane parallel to the ground.
In over 50 and have inverted y axis all my life. I don’t play games that lack a way to invert. I’m moving my head - just makes sense.
Other data that may or may not be related: I have aphantasia and can only visualize while dreaming. I’m good at rotation exercises but am slow.
I used to get a bunch of grief from my friends about being a look-inverted sort of person. I got the last laugh when I rented a front-loader for a landscaping project and they all wanted to drive it but nobody but me could be efficient with it because stick-back=scoop-up was the only option.
I don't know why we felt like a landscaping tool made look inversion legitimate where everything else was I-will-die-on-this-hill indignance, but it did.
That sounds like you're visualizing the lever being on your side of a pivot point, so when you push it down the other side goes up. Feels natural enough to me!
If the lever is on your side of the pivot point, you'd have to invert both horizontal and vertical axes. I don't have any data, but I certainly don't know anyone who plays with both axes inverted (in first person games).
I sometimes do if the camera is far enough back that I feel like I'm controlling it as it zooms around the character's head. Maybe that makes it not first person, idk.
Usually its just Y-inverted for me though.
> as it zooms around the character's head.
This is a third-person camera. First-person is strictly seeing from the character's eyes.
looking left or right is a rotation not a pivot.
It feels especially right once the bucket contacts the ground. Pushing forward on the stick is then a bit like doing a push-up.
I was on a pretty steep hill also, so sometimes forward literally was down.
> What they discovered through the cognitive testing was that a lot of assumptions being made around controller preferences were wrong. “None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted,” says Corbett. “It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.” So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. “Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”
“Simon Effect” is where you are slower to react with the right hand button when the object is displayed on the left and vice versa.
So, slow to rotate or react is more accurate? I feel like I need to understand more here, as this seems like an important brain difference. I’m an inverted player, assumed it was because of MS Flight Sim (1st game), can rotate really well, but am probably very slow at it! Would love to know more!
Edit: I know that I am very slow to overcome the “Simon Effect”, having done this sort of testing in the past. I’d be curious if others experience the same. Perhaps there is more going on than just inverted vs not being something “innate”, whereby the inverted player simply struggles to adapt to a new scheme more and hence has stuck with it.
>Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more
Being faster than your opponent is often an advantage in multiplayer games, so I don't think it's fake to ignore the speed of answers for measuring how good a gamer is.
Being faster on a lab-administered test doesn’t tell you anything about your game-playing ability. This research was focused on determining why people invert their controls, nothing more.
> In short, gamers think they are an inverter or a non-inverter because of how they were first exposed to game controls. Someone who played a lot of flight sims in the 1980s may have unconsciously taught themselves to invert and now they consider that their innate preference; alternatively a gamer who grew up in the 2000s, when non-inverted controls became prevalent may think they are naturally a non-inverter. However, cognitive tests suggest otherwise. It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space.
If playing a lot of flight sims in the 1980s changed how their brains perceive objects in 3D space, there's no contradiction.
The research didn't study that so we can't draw any conclusions about the effects of playing flight sims in the 80s on human perception of objects in 3D space.
Faster choices doesn't necessarily mean /better/ decision making. You can just do bad things quickly :-)
The right decision executed with bad timing is worse than the right decision executed with good timing. Games are played in real time, this isn't about post game analysis.
they could just be more impulsive. i.e. less able to inhibit whatever comes to mind
Faster at mental shape rotation? Seems you play some unique fps games…
The assumption is that it correlates with the speed of other spatial tasks. Being able to predict the future of yourself and other players in how they are moving within the environment is useful for fps games.
That’s your assumption, and if it were true there wouldn’t have been top level quake players who used inverted. Yet there are. I don’t think one follows the other.
To me it's more likely that those are outliers of the trend. Pros themselves are outliers, so I think it would be better to look at the average players.
> I’m an inverted player, assumed it was because of MS Flight Sim (1st game)
Yeah, me too, I've also always assumed that's why I prefer "inverted" as well (never heard the term before the article).
Certainly seems like a much simpler explanation...
You've never heard of the term inverted before the article? Don't most games ask if you want normal or inverted controls in the settings, so do you not play games often?
When I was a kid, all the controls by default were what is now called "inverted Y-axis" and rarely had an option to change it. I think it flipped around the 2010s, I remember being confused when I bought my Switch and got back into gaming.
That's right, I do remember that, and I think that's how I got into using inverted in the first place.
I've seen what the article seems to think is normal described as "reversed" more often.
Yeah, back in the day there's games I'd play with a joystick vs those with a mouse, and I always invert/airplane for joystick controls and non invert for mouse. Anecdotally that was common in my cohort.
Same. Inverted is strictly for flight.
Same. My first FPS-style games were all flight sims.
i wonder why planes are designed this way?
I think a big part of it, historically, is that this control scheme provides negative feedback, which may help stabilize the controls.
Think about the inertia of the pilot and their limbs inside the plane, acting on the controls. A sudden acceleration/jerk in the direction of the control signal will bias the operator's body to input the opposite control signal unless they are tensed up and prepared to maintain it in spite of the forces they experience.
If the nose pitches up suddenly, you're likely to push the yoke forward. If it pitches down suddenly, you're likely to pull back a bit. Similarly, if the plane (or boat) jerks forward, you are more likely to pull back on the throttle than push it forward. A sudden airplane roll will bias you to input the opposite aileron signal.
Even in a car, if you are holding the top half of the wheel as in the classic 10-and-2 grip, a sudden turn will cause you to counter steer a bit as you experience the centripetal force effect pulling you towards the outside of the turn.
If the controls were inverted, all these default inputs would instead cause positive feedback and seem more likely to send a vehicle out of control.
I think it is because your lever to control the plane does not go up or down but forward and back. and then you pitch the lever the same way you want to pitch the plane. forward to pitch forward and back to pitch back.
Same reason throttles are pushed forward to go faster and backwards to go slower. Except on bulldozers, which have a deaccelerator for some reason. and game controller shoulder levers for ergonomic reasons.
I think if the lever were mounted up and down they(the wright brothers) probably would have wired it to pitch the plane up and down. I am not sure why it was not mounted up and down, probably a combination of arm strength, ergonomics of movement and simplicity of mechanical design.
It would be interesting to see if left handers and right handers differ on this. I can adapt to any scheme with basically zero mental effort, and I've heard this is common in lefties (as I am). Stuff like "hold this up to a mirror for answer" never worked for me because I could read a whole page like that without noticing it's backwards. Da Vinci certainly had it with his inverted notebooks
Yeah, I always assumed my inversion preference was something to do with my left-handedness.
I'm guessing it should have been tested for in the study cited. Massive omitted variable bias if not.
Red Faction: Armageddon uses a clever method to set your inversion preference: w hen you first enter the game, it asks you to look up and then adjusts the controls based on that instinctive input.
That is a very clever way to work it out, I'm going to use it im my Godot stuff.
I don't remember if this was the game or not, but I tend to set the settings ahead of time, and I specifically recall a game getting to this sort of in-game mechanic of look up/ look down and reversing the setting I had previously set because it assumed I didn't already choose what I wanted (e.g. it re-inverted my reverted settings back to "normal").
You can switch between the two easily by imagining a lever on the back of the characters head vs front of their head - press up to push the lever higher for the back vs lower for the front. Same goes for planes etc
That works for up and down. But what about side to side? I don't know anyone who inverts left/right. If the lever was at the back of the head, won't left/right be inverted too?
Put your finger on top of the character's head. Left and right are still left and right, but forward (up on the controls because of how they're positioned) makes the character look down and backward makes the character look up.
~20 years ago on Xbox360 we could set this as a system-wide preference. Now in 2025 for every game with camera/first-person control I play on any platform it's time to:
1. hope there's an invert option (not always!)
2. find an opportunity to change it (can't always do so before starting the game, nothing loses immersion like waiting for a cutscene to finish then immediately spending time hunting through a menu)
3. actually find it (will it be under gameplay? controls? somewhere else entirely)
Bonus: if it's a game with "grab the drawer then pull with the thumbstick to open it" mechanics, hope that they remembered to invert those too
Bonus 2: repeat the above for turning off controller vibration, which was also a global preference on the 360.
PC bonus: hope that the option does _not_ affect the mouse (I sometimes switch to mouse+kbd or mouse+controller, I never want to invert my mouse)
Yes, some games present the main brightness/control/etc. options when you begin a new save - but I don't know that's about to happen so have already spent the time hunting in the options menu...
If there wasn’t an invert option in the game then the Xbox 360 setting wouldn’t take effect.
Agreed with others it's just what you're used to. I was inverted-y for most of my gaming life because I started with flight sims where it was mandatory, reflecting the real life hardware. So I used the same in FPS games when they came around. Decades later I had kids and had to spend some time sharing a mouse with them, and didn't want to condemn them to a life of having to look for "inverted Y axis" in the settings of every game (+1 to the post above who requested an OS-level setting for this!), so I left it on the default in Minecraft and learned the other way. Now I'm actually bilingual and can swap from one to the other with about 2 minutes warm up time. This is the same as what happens with driving on the left/right side of the road if you spend a lot of time in different countries driving.
With my kids I drew the grumpy line at Minecraft's new Autojump setting tho ... They had to learn with that disabled.
You might enjoy reading the article.
For me at least, the answer is very easy: play the game without changing the settings. If you repeatedly turn the wrong direction, switch.
The camera should feel natural, and you should be able to do it without thinking. So just let your subconscious pick.
IIRC Halo had a neat system for setting inversion like this.
Instead of asking the player "do you want inversion or not", it instructed the player "look up" and observed their input.
Yup, 3 minutes into this video: https://youtu.be/JvEJ6VmCR4g
(Halo 3 is the first one I played so I don't know if they did it before this one)
I'm pretty sure it was done on the first one, Halo CE for the original Xbox. The last times I've played it have been coop in the MCC though which skips that part.
Yes, it goes all the way back to the original game. Very nice bit of game design.
Isn't that what everyone does?
There is a good reason given for why flight controls are "inverted" buried somewhere in those "The Secret of Flight" videos by Alexander Lippisch:
https://archive.org/details/the-secret-of-flight/Secret+Of+F...
Keeping the stick in a vertical position will automatically correct flight path changes of the airplane caused by external forces. Basically a very primitive form of autopilot.
PS: it's in video 5 (Stability and Control) around timestamp 16:00
I grew up on N64, which had inverted axes. Nintendo continued that tradition for the longest time.
It extends beyond joystick inputs. I also can't deal with Apple's scrolling defaults. I have to invert every Apple trackpad and device.
> In short, gamers think they are an inverter or a non-inverter because of how they were first exposed to game controls
Bingo! This mirrors my experience.
> It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space.
I've tried both. I can do both. But I prefer the style I grew up with.
Yep, Goldeneye.
I like them inverted for ships/vehicles but not for first person cameras, if that makes any sense. Surely I'm not alone?
I think the difference here is that I think of the vehicles as being parallel to a horizontal plane whereas people are normally standing up so perpendicular. Hitting "up" means different things across those two scenarios.
Same for me. I need inverted controls for flight/space sims, but use direct controls for FPS games.
We were playing CoD zombies with my father in law the other day, and he was really struggling with the overall concept of the two joysticks for moving and looking. I realised he was consistently expecting the joystick to go the opposite way (up/down) compared to what it was actually doing. I said you have to push up to look up.
I remembered he flies Airbuses for a living, and they use a joystick, where pulling back/down is looking up. I inverted the controls and he immediately found it a lot easier to use.
There's a classic experiment of which variations have been done for almost a century now. Put on goggles that use mirrors to flip vision upside down. People adjust much faster than one might think. Minutes to hours. Those who have worn them for multiple days report that the world stops looking upside down with them. Wear them long enough and the world looks upside down when they're taken off.
Played flight simulator with a controller and invert on a controller for any 3D game. Don't invert with a mouse and keyboard on a computer. For me, preference was based on gaming experience.
Flight sims invert only one axis, how weird.
Want your airplane to point towards something on the left side of the screen? Move your joystick to the left.
Want your airplane to point towards something on the top of the screen? Move your joystick down. Wait, what?
Er, that's not how flight sims work. Moving your joystick "left" rolls left. To "point left", you push your joystick left and then down and then back right (roll, pitch, roll). The model is totally different.
That very much depends on the game. I cut my teeth on the X-Wing games, where the x axis was for yaw, not roll. To roll you would hold down the top joystick button and move the stick left/right. As a result, to this day I have to remap any game which puts roll on the x axis. It just feels wrong.
> Flight sims invert only one axis, how weird.
The reason is explained here starting at around timestamp 16:00, it's not weird at all but completely intuitive:
https://archive.org/details/the-secret-of-flight/Secret+Of+F...
I invert (Clair Obscur most recently) because I'm controlling the camera. If I want to look to the left, the camera has to move to the right. I can't play third-person any other way and I have tried!
Oh man... I've never read anyone perceiving third-person movement controls this way before and you just blew my mind.
But you are the camera!
GP is talking about third person perspective games. "You" (the character you're playing) aren't the camera. You are the character the camera points to.
The camera is hovering somewhere above/behind the player character. To move the field of view left while keeping the player centered in the FOV, the camera has to translate/orbit right.
In a 3rd person perspective game, I am controlling a character that I can see with my eyes. I'm not the character.
Yes. I clarified that "you" meant something different from the usual meaning in the comment you're replying to.
Are you making a joke? I feel like I'm being whooshed.
You each view the world differently, and neither of you are right or wrong. I had to learn spherical astronomy to get the East/West flips on basic up-facing first-person charts correct, and I have to invert differently for first- and third-person views in video games. Not to mention the nightmare of how camera independent axes controls sometimes swap “left” and “right” rotation on the Q and E keys because game designers assume that their mental model of CW and CCW inputs is universal across all players and each game has a coin flip chance of being different from the next. It most definitely is not! (Do you slew the camera from the direction, or do you pivot the camera to the direction?)
Interesting conclusion. My wife struggles with controls in 3d games and is notably not a shape-rotator, but she is a great illustrator. On the other hand, I can assemble ikea blindfolded, but cannot even approximate a human form on paper. Maybe she should try inverted.
I really feel like the result regarding "non inverters were faster" probably won't replicate and was just this group of researchers needing to produce some kind of tangible result from their research. It just doesn't add up.
I don't play video games but I invert the trackpad scroll direction on macOS. I cannot understand people who use the default "natural" scrolling, it's anything but natural, and it's baffling that it's the default.
I once had an Apple fanboy explain to me at excruciating length that my preference was actually factually and objectively wrong, and that everyone should use the macOS scrolling and that anyone who doesn't is just stupid. I do not miss the Apple fanboys.
Huh. I always thought it was far simpler: back in the day we loved flight sims and joysticks. Then our D-pad console controllers got joysticks. So naturally the devs went with what they knew. The rest is just inertia.
I REALLY wish this was a setting I could set once on my computer and ALL games respected it. I prefer inverted X and Y but there’s SO many games out there that just don’t provide this as a setting. I’ve tried playing with non-inverted but I end up just getting frustrated and stopping.
IIRC the Xbox had global controller settings like this. Not sure if games had to opt-in though.
The problem for me is that I prefer inverted only for specific control schemes (e.g. airplanes inverted, but first person non-inverted).
When you grab the back of a person’s head tightly, and want to make them look up, which direction do you pull?
This is how my brain works too. The joystick is the head and my thumb is on top. I pull back to make the little joystick man look up, and push forward to look down.
Edit to add:
>It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.
This tracks with me. I feel like games that require quick multi-dimensional movements (FPS includes) I'm dreadfully slow at. Especially if the game doesn't have the one control setup that my brain prefers, which many don't.
Sure. But assaulting a person isn't the same as playing a videogame is it?
Also, you can make completely irrelevent analogies in the other direction too.
E.g. When you're looking at the cinema and want to move your eyes to look at the top, where do do you move them? You move them up.
Most people prefer to play where up means up, which makes complete sense.
Don’t know about you but I feel muscles pulling on my eyeballs to move them. I don’t push them up.
Most people playing videogames seem to disagree with you. They agree that up means up.
Ok, then answer this: When you grab the the back of a person's head tightly, and you want to make them look left, which direction do you pull?
Yet, very few people play inverted X axis...
To me, the y axis in the controller is forward, not up. So push head forward to look down. There's no rotation on most joysticks, so there's no 1-to-1 comparison between the two.
I like my right x-axis to be strafing and my left x-axis to be turning, which makes turning while walking way more natural to me.
I think the article is right, and some of your explanation is post rationalization rather than actual reason.
Depends on if he’s hanging upside down or not
When I got my first Xbox, I had hell playing Halo and Call of Duty, until I found the look inversion in settings. I immediately got better at playing. My friends hated it when I came over to play on their console because I always screwed with their controller settings.
Look inversion always felt natural. I never played flight simulators either. It must have been something I got used to on an arcade game in the 80's. I have no clue what game it could have been though. I wish I had all those quarters back.
For me, context is important. Simulated fight? I can only play with inverted Y axis. Everything else, I’m completely useless with inverted Y.
It seems silly because it’s all equally imaginary, but that’s how it is.
Makes no difference if it’s a mouse or joystick.
> “It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks.” So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. “Though they tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”
> In short, gamers think they are an inverter or a non-inverter because of how they were first exposed to game controls. Someone who played a lot of flight sims in the 1980s may have unconsciously taught themselves to invert and now they consider that their innate preference; alternatively a gamer who grew up in the 2000s, when non-inverted controls became prevalent may think they are naturally a non-inverter. However, cognitive tests suggest otherwise. It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space.
Or maybe it is the opposite: playing frequently with (non-)inverted controls makes you better at the kind of games they made the subjects play in this test. This article does a very poor job convincing me that their thesis is correct.
My personal experience is that I never played a 3D game with a controller until a couple of years ago (I am 31). Always keyboars and mouse now. When I started, my girlfriend asked me if I preferred normal controls. I was equally terrible with either, so we stuck to whatever she prefers (both axes inverted). I have a very hard time believing that this is not just a matter of practice.
Chuck Yeager made me do it! Or maybe it was EA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat
For me, it was Wing Commander
No, it was Top Gun on NES.
Because their heads are screwed on backwards. Duh.
(/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)
Inverted Y axis means that the stick mirrors my head movements.
Why wouldn't you also need an inverted X axis to truly mirror your head movements?
That's true. I used to think I was mentally modeling the input as dragging a joystick on the back of the character's head, but it doesn't quite work if you are looking left and right. Now I wonder if it's a lot more subconscious and the "model" explanation is just a rationalization that feels right.
Maybe it's like how some people feel more natural goofy foot on a skateboard/snowboard than the regular way, regardless of their handedness.
I do think a lot of the reasons we believe are just attempts to rationalize what just feels natural to us.
I definitely feel more natural goofy, although I am right handed... but I am also left footed, so I am all kinds of messed up.
The model is dragging the head itself as if it is a joystick. Left and right don't swap, but arrow up maps to forward, which tilts the head down.
The word "mirrors" seems unfortunate here... But yeah, imagine a giant thumb on your head, to make your head look to the sky, the thumb has to pull it backwards.
I used to invert them but realized two things: 1: anyone can adapt to any control scheme given enough time (which isn't much) 2: majority of games default to, and people play with, non inverted controls. If you don't see yourself playing flight sims constantl y, it's just easier for everyone involved to learn the noninverted controls so that no one has to constantly change control mappings
Disclosure: Didn’t read. But I did always get heckled at gatherings for inverting my controls, and then forgetting to switch them back. I think it came from whatever console you started with first (Sega Saturn), if you played early PC joystick games (Tie Fighter!), and Goldeneye’s Solitare configuration, which allowed deadly accuracy without needing to invoke the crosshairs.
This is specifically mentioned in the article as the common reason given, but that it is wrong. People think this is why, but then they study them and it’s an innate difference.
It's not as simple as whatever this article says. I can play inverted and regulary and have played games throughout my life in both ways. So it's not simply an "innate" difference.
It's preference, and people can easily learn the difference if they played for 10 mins. It's easy to get used to.
The article itself notes that people can do both (to varying degrees).
Preferences can in fact be innate, and "innate" does not imply mutual exclusivity.
Fellow inverter and this theory makes total sense
Not a gamer as such apart from "I've played some computer games at some points in my life". I don't know about the current generation(s!) of gamers, but in DN3D and Quake when "mouselook" was first added, the default was what "inverted" as in forward = aim down. Then "invert mouse" was added that made it "normal". I did very little flight sims but I played quake, Q2, Q3 and Half-Life this way (forward=down), possibly also HL2 and I can't remember why, then I switched. My best friend from school also played this way. I honestly don't remember how it started; I always thought it was because that's how I first played.
As someone who prefers plane-style controls, I would say that have a rather hard time mentally rotating 3D controls. I suppose that's what the article would call 'inverted controls', but the description is terrible: 'push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down'. A better description would be 'move the right analogue stick back in order to make the camera face down'.
Regardless, if motorcycle-style controls (forward to point the camera up) would make me faster but less accurate then I'm not interested. I'm the type to prioritise accuracy over speed.
The description isn't terrible, though. That's what the input direction is called (see also d-pad down, arrow down)
I'm not surprised. I have introduced several people to gaming, both adults and children. I let them all start with the default settings, and I don't even tell them there are settings. Then I observe their movements. I observe whether they consistently (or very often) start looking the wrong way before correcting. If they do that a lot, I change the settings, and it's smooth sailing from there.
So from my anecdotal perspective, explanations based on previous experience make no sense. It had to be something more innate, more related to how our brains are "wired".
Some people invert Y but not X. This is the most surprising to me. Most I've seen invert both. I don't remember having seen someone invert X but not Y.
Personally I invert both, except for games with a mouse to aim (like 3rd person shooters). In that case I invert neither. Go figure.
> Some people invert Y but not X. This is the most surprising to me. Most I've seen invert both. I don't remember having seen someone invert X but not Y.
Interesting, because I've never seen someone invert X. They either invert Y, or neither. Personally I invert Y only in flight games, anything else feels wrong to me.
I invert Y axis in games, disable "natural" scroll on touchpads, and ride a skateboard goofy.
It drives ma absolutely bananas that you cannot easily invert your mouse wheel direction in either Windows or Macos.
When I scroll up my brain breaks because the display goes in the opposite direction to what I expect.
You'd think it would be a key feature because every game provides direction inversion.
What are you referring to? Inverting scroll wheel direction in macOS is trivial (and one of the first things I change), you just uncheck the "natural scrolling" checkbox.
I play games but not that often. What I find puzzling is that whenever I start out in a new first-person perspective game, it takes me a while to even figure out something’s wrong. I can play uninverted-Y just about well enough to not immediately notice.
Rationally, I know I want invert-Y turned on and I know it’s probably off by default, but for the life of me it takes a good few minutes to figure out that the controls aren’t quite right and something needs changing.
It’s like being able to eat with inverted fork and knife just well enough that it takes a while to notice something is wrong.
Because we started on a flight-sim?
The article addresses this, and hints at evidence this might not be the actual answer.
Seems super light on details, I guess I'm supposed to read the paper that's not linked? Not sure why this has to be new journalist and scientific research, couldn't you just ask Microsoft for some Halo stats and call it a day?
Wayyyyy back in the day, I got a copy of Descent.
When you’re flying that spaceship, you’re best to use the default controls — pivoting is the name of the game.
Ever since then, that’s just how I was comfortable doing things.
I still change any FPS game keybinds to mimic as close as I can to Descent controls.
Descent is one of the rare games that really benefits from two joysticks.
I am somewhat weird among my peers in this respect: I invert Y on joystick controls only (and leave it as default for mouse controls). Probably there are other people who do this - it certainly makes sense to me - but almost everyone else (invert-Y or not) seems to find this odd when I actually discuss it.
It didn't super matter until I started using a steam deck, which has both joysticks and touchpads. I usually need to reverse one or the other in the steam controller mapping, since few games let you configure invert-Y separately for different input devices.
I will never understand these people who invert their camera controls, especially in something like Dark Souls. You are playing as a knight not an airplane.
The stick is the player character's head. Pull back their head and they look up.
For me it was because I'm right handed and if I was holding a gun with both hands I'd move my right hand down to aim up.
It just makes sense that way. I can't adjust.
Except you wouldn't move your right hand, because that would change the sight plane.
You'd move your left hand, pushing up against the stock/handguard.
The physical movement of "looking upwards" involves a muscle (your neck) going down
This feels so obvious to me as an inverter.
Inverted x and y has always made sense to me; I think of controlling a camera on a gimbal, so to look to the right the camera needs to swing to the left
Id like to know why so many, if not all in my experience, early 3D games were inverted by default? If regular style appears to be considerably more common how did that avoid being the standard?
The notion of splits in vim and tmux and inverted. I.e., what vim calls vertical split is what tmux calls horizontal split. As a life-long vimmer, naturally, I'm in the vim camp.
I specifically prefer inverted controls in third person (tilting the stick up moves the camera up, so to point at the character it must then tilt the view down), but non-inverted controls in first person (tilting up points my view up).
Of course for those who learned the "correct" controls from aviation, the real question is why planes have the stick "inverted" and how that tradition started.
I suspect it is to prevent cascading mistakes. In aviation the controls move in the opposite way of the shift from the current vector of the pilot, that way, if you bump the control, you’re not moved in the direction to exaggerate the mistake.
"Inverted" is definitely correct for flight sims and (probably) third person games, but is less obvious for first person where you are moving a reticle.
I inverted mine because I grew up on joystick games like Falcon
At least you think that is the reason... if you read the article, it addresses this.
Why do I always invert the Y-axis but never the X-axis?
Because motion along the x-axis (left-right) is a body rotation about the gravity vector. y-axis motion is not.
We are upright beings in a gravitational field, so if we see a berry to the left of our visual field, we turn our whole body to face it. Then we walk towards it. We do this from a first person vantage only. We don't see our own backs - just the world itself.
But if a berry is above our visual field, we can't rotate our body that way. That would make us fall over. We instead remain vertical to gravity and rotate a third-person thing. We tilt something else like an arm or stick in the direction. We see this from a third-person vantage only. We see the back of the arm, or back of the stick. If the berry is up high, the part of the stick closer to us is down low. We see the inverted end moving, so it becomes intuitive. Of course, you can focus on the far end of the stick and get a non-inverted intuition too. But this is only possible from a third-person view which we don't often get when our bodies so easily rotate about the gravity vector.
Some have pilot controls and some have eye aim
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I think mostly I'm just used to it. Maybe inverted-Y was a common default at some point.
Why isnt gyro gaming more popular.
Because some people understand how to setup controls properly.
I invert vertical axis always, and I’m on the camp of first being exposed to flight simulators for games.
Using regular configuration feels wrong.
Because that's what my uncle taught me on his PC in the early 90s