Comment by lll-o-lll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lll-o-lll | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Faster at mental shape rotation? Seems you play some unique fps games…

The assumption is that it correlates with the speed of other spatial tasks. Being able to predict the future of yourself and other players in how they are moving within the environment is useful for fps games.

That’s your assumption, and if it were true there wouldn’t have been top level quake players who used inverted. Yet there are. I don’t think one follows the other.

To me it's more likely that those are outliers of the trend. Pros themselves are outliers, so I think it would be better to look at the average players.

Faster choices doesn't necessarily mean /better/ decision making. You can just do bad things quickly :-)

The right decision executed with bad timing is worse than the right decision executed with good timing. Games are played in real time, this isn't about post game analysis.

they could just be more impulsive. i.e. less able to inhibit whatever comes to mind

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.

If playing a lot of flight sims in the 1980s changed how their brains perceive objects in 3D space, there's no contradiction.

The research didn't study that so we can't draw any conclusions about the effects of playing flight sims in the 80s on human perception of objects in 3D space.

> 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...

Same. My first FPS-style games were all flight sims.

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.

Same. Inverted is strictly for flight.

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?

When I was a kid, all the controls by default were what is now called "inverted Y-axis" and rarely had an option to change it. I think it flipped around the 2010s, I remember being confused when I bought my Switch and got back into gaming.

That's right, I do remember that, and I think that's how I got into using inverted in the first place.

I've seen what the article seems to think is normal described as "reversed" more often.

i wonder why planes are designed this way?

I 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.

I think a big part of it, historically, is that this control scheme provides negative feedback, which may help stabilize the controls.

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.

> I think a big part of it, historically, is that this control scheme provides negative feedback

> 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.

I'm not talking about some weird steady-state condition, where gravity dominates the situation. I'm talking about sudden rotations and what happens before you even have time to react.

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.

Nope, sorry, you're wrong. I've spent hundreds of hours flying small airplanes, my earlier comment explained what actually happens in real life.

Hmm, color me confused... I am not a pilot but heard this from pilot acquaintances and thought I understood the physics. I wonder if we're still talking about different time intervals though? I'm talking about the immediate effect in situations like buffeting/turbulence, in milliseconds before the pilot's nervous system can even react.

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.

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

Yeah, I always assumed my inversion preference was something to do with my left-handedness.

I'm guessing it should have been tested for in the study cited. Massive omitted variable bias if not.

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