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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Readit News
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)
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 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.
Guess we're evolved to throw spears, so we're good at that kind of thing.
> 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.
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.
I sort of picture my hand on the crown of my player models head and my movements move his skull around.
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".
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.
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 Comment
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.
I was on a pretty steep hill also, so sometimes forward literally was down.
“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.
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.
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...
I'm guessing it should have been tested for in the study cited. Massive omitted variable bias if not.
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...
With my kids I drew the grumpy line at Minecraft's new Autojump setting tho ... They had to learn with that disabled.