Why do some gamers invert their controls?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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 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.
> 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.
Guess we're evolved to throw spears, so we're good at that kind of thing.
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. (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 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".
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.
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 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.
This is a third-person camera. First-person is strictly seeing from the character's eyes.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
That is completely backwards, sorry.
If the nose pitches up suddenly, the pilot tends to fall backwards, downhill. If the pilot holds the yoke like a handle, he commands further pitch up, which causes him to fall backwards more... The opposite is also true: a sudden pitch down causes an unrestrained pilot to fall forward onto the controls, commanding further pitch down, and so on.
Also, I'm talking about the planes where these control schemes were developed a century ago. In these, center of gravity and the aerodynamic center and the pilot were all relatively close to each other. This is different on some modern airliner where the pilot is perched far out in front of the wings.
In those old planes, a pitch or roll would literally rotate the plane around the pilot who momentarily continues in their original orientation. If you are sitting at your desk with hands on a keyboard and I suddenly pitch your desk up, your hands will push further into the keyboard rather than fall away. This is how the pilot would experience the sudden pitch-up as well.
Think of the pilot and plane being in level flight and the nose suddenly pitches up. In that moment, the seat jerks away from the pilot's back and the instrument panel and windshield jerk towards the pilot. In that moment is where I believe there would be some negative input to the yoke. The plane is pitching up but the pilot is still level.
I understand that, eventually, the pilot will also pitch up, due to pressure from the seat bottom and tension from straps. In the longer time scale where that happens, the pilot's nervous system also allows them to intentionally modify their control inputs.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Are you making a joke? I feel like I'm being whooshed.
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?
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...
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.
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.
The problem for me is that I prefer inverted only for specific control schemes (e.g. airplanes inverted, but first person non-inverted).
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.
(/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)
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.
> 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.
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.
It's preference, and people can easily learn the difference if they played for 10 mins. It's easy to get used to.
Preferences can in fact be innate, and "innate" does not imply mutual exclusivity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It just makes sense that way. I can't adjust.
You'd move your left hand, pushing up against the stock/handguard.
This feels so obvious to me as an inverter.
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.
Using regular configuration feels wrong.