Because we started on a flight-sim?

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.

Because some people understand how to setup controls properly.

I inverted mine because I grew up on joystick games like Falcon

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.

When you grab the back of a person’s head tightly, and want to make them look up, which direction do you pull?

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.

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.

Inverted Y axis means that the stick mirrors my head movements.

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!

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.

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.

Chuck Yeager made me do it! Or maybe it was EA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat

Because their heads are screwed on backwards. Duh.

(/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)

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

> 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.

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.

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.

Why do I always invert the Y-axis but never the X-axis?

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?

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.

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.

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 think mostly I'm just used to it. Maybe inverted-Y was a common default at some point.

~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...

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.