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Why do some gamers invert their controls?
- userbinator 1y agoOf 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.
- scoofy 1y agoI 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.
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoBecause we started on a flight-sim?
- the_af 1y agoThe article addresses this, and hints at evidence this might not be the actual answer.
- astockwell 1y agoDisclosure: 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.
- elpakal 1y agoFellow inverter and this theory makes total sense
- lll-o-lll 1y agoThis 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.
- saberience 1y agoIt'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.
- filleduchaos 1y agoThe article itself notes that people can do both (to varying degrees). Preferences can in fact be innate, and "innate" does not imply mutual exclusivity.
- Marazan 1y agoBecause some people understand how to setup controls properly.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoI inverted mine because I grew up on joystick games like Falcon
- cortesoft 1y agoAt least you think that is the reason... if you read the article, it addresses this.
- airstrike 1y agoI 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.
- the_af 1y agoSame for me. I need inverted controls for flight/space sims, but use direct controls for FPS games.
- deadbabe 1y agoWhen you grab the back of a person’s head tightly, and want to make them look up, which direction do you pull?
- jayknight 1y agoThis 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.
- elpakal 1y agoDepends on if he’s hanging upside down or not
- cortesoft 1y agoOk, 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...
- jayknight 1y agoTo 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.
- cortesoft 1y agoI think the article is right, and some of your explanation is post rationalization rather than actual reason.
- echelon 1y agoI 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.
- warmedcookie 1y agoYep, Goldeneye.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI 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.
- hyperhello 1y agoThat 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!
- ash_091 1y agoIf 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).
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI 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.
- Izkata 1y ago> as it zooms around the character's head. This is a third-person camera. First-person is strictly seeing from the character's eyes.
- dwh452 1y agolooking left or right is a rotation not a pivot.
- pdpi 1y agoInverted Y axis means that the stick mirrors my head movements.
- cortesoft 1y agoWhy wouldn't you also need an inverted X axis to truly mirror your head movements?
- allenu 1y agoThat'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.
- cortesoft 1y agoI 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.
- Izkata 1y agoThe 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- netsharc 1y agoThe 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.
- jameskilton 1y agoI 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!
- squigz 1y agoBut you are the camera!
- ash_091 1y agoGP 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.
- abhinavk 1y agoIn a 3rd person perspective game, I am controlling a character that I can see with my eyes. I'm not the character.
- ash_091 1y agoYes. 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.
- altairprime 1y agoYou 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?)
- petepete 1y agoFor 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.
- esseph 1y agoExcept 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.
- Grumpily3962 1y agoInteresting 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.
- thebruce87m 1y agoChuck Yeager made me do it! Or maybe it was EA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoBecause their heads are screwed on backwards. Duh. (/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)
- jkcxn 1y agoYou 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
- kosherhurricane 1y agoThat 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?
- Izkata 1y agoPut 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.
- lll-o-lll 1y ago> 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.
- jcalvinowens 1y ago> 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...
- dwh452 1y agoi wonder why planes are designed this way?
- somat 1y agoI 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.
- TrianguloY 1y agoFor 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.
- lucb1e 1y agoIsn't that what everyone does?
- ash_091 1y agoIIRC 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.
- rawling 1y agoYup, 3 minutes into this video: https://youtu.be/JvEJ6VmCR4g https://youtu.be/JvEJ6VmCR4g (Halo 3 is the first one I played so I don't know if they did it before this one)
- Arrowmaster 1y agoI'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.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoYes, it goes all the way back to the original game. Very nice bit of game design.
- 4ad 1y agoI 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.
- arp242 1y agoI 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.
- rom1v 1y agoWhy do I always invert the Y-axis but never the X-axis?
- geor9e 1y agoBecause 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.
- MintPaw 1y agoSeems 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?
- joelccr 1y agoWe 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.
- amalcon 1y agoI 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.
- vleaflet 1y agoRed 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.
- parlortricks 1y agoThat is a very clever way to work it out, I'm going to use it im my Godot stuff.
- wingmanjd 1y agoI 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").
- lanfeust6 1y agoI think mostly I'm just used to it. Maybe inverted-Y was a common default at some point.
- crtasm 1y ago~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...
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoIf there wasn’t an invert option in the game then the Xbox 360 setting wouldn’t take effect.
- sjrd 1y agoI'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.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago> 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.
- Waterluvian 1y agoHuh. 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.
- adrr 1y agoPlayed 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.
- Buttons840 1y agoFlight 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?
- Ferret7446 1y agoEr, 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.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoThat 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.
- flohofwoe 1y ago> 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+Flight+05+Stability+And+Control.mp4 https://archive.org/details/the-secret-of-flight/Secret+Of+F...
- jrm4 1y agoThe physical movement of "looking upwards" involves a muscle (your neck) going down This feels so obvious to me as an inverter.
- nkrisc 1y agoFor 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.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoLike 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.
- jsrcout 1y agoI'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.
- Izkata 1y agoYes, 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.
- wavemode 1y agoAirplane 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.
- almosthere 1y agoSome have pilot controls and some have eye aim
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- manchmalscott 1y agoI 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).
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoBecause that's what my uncle taught me on his PC in the early 90s
- regus 1y agoI 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.
- a_cardboard_box 1y agoThe stick is the player character's head. Pull back their head and they look up.
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoIt 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.
- JulianWasTaken 1y agoWhat 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.
- liveoneggs 1y agoI invert Y axis in games, disable "natural" scroll on touchpads, and ride a skateboard goofy.
- michaelteter 1y agoThe 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".
- ectospheno 1y agoIn 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- filleduchaos 1y agoI 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.
- retrac 1y agoThere'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.
- kylec 1y agoI 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.
- flohofwoe 1y agoIIRC 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).
- hhhAndrew 1y agoAgreed 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.
- tiahura 1y agoYou might enjoy reading the article.
- mproud 1y agoWayyyyy 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.
- dustbunny 1y agoI 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.
- gorgoiler 1y agoI 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.
- sebtron 1y ago> “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.
- Izikiel43 1y agoI invert vertical axis always, and I’m on the camp of first being exposed to flight simulators for games. Using regular configuration feels wrong.
- flohofwoe 1y agoThere 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+Flight+01+Preview.mp4 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
- AstroNutt 1y agoWhen 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.
- tmtvl 1y agoAs 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.
- filleduchaos 1y agoThe description isn't terrible, though. That's what the input direction is called (see also d-pad down, arrow down)
- wowczarek 1y agoNot 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.
- xnx 1y ago"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.
- HK-NC 1y agoId 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?
- maxglute 1y agoWhy isnt gyro gaming more popular.
- penguin_booze 1y agoThe 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.
- dvdhs 1y agoInverted 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
- arkaic 1y agoI 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