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.
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.
Yet, very few people play inverted X axis...
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.
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 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.
Usually its just Y-inverted for me though.
I was on a pretty steep hill also, so sometimes forward literally was down.
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 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 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.
It just makes sense that way. I can't adjust.
You'd move your left hand, pushing up against the stock/handguard.
(/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)
“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.
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...
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.
> 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 camera should feel natural, and you should be able to do it without thinking. So just let your subconscious pick.
Instead of asking the player "do you want inversion or not", it instructed the player "look up" and observed their input.
(Halo 3 is the first one I played so I don't know if they did it before this one)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
This feels so obvious to me as an inverter.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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".
bethekidyouwant•3h ago
the_af•3h ago