When up means down: why do so many video game players invert their controls?

[Deleted member 59803]

One thing to note is how someone interprets what action is occurring...

For e.g. In uncharted my brain thinks it's controlling the camera location, which naturally points at the character. I move the camera downwards with the stick by pushing it down. Because it's point of interest remains in it's place, the angle naturally tilts up.

So in my head I'm not controlling where I'm looking, I'm controlling the camera location.

 

[*Splinter]

Inverted for mouse, non inverted for controller. It's just what you're used to I think

First line is already wrong, imho.
I don't know anyone who inverts upwards MOVEMENT. It's exclusively for camera controls (be it in 3rd or 1st Person), i.e. LOOKING.

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Yeah that line bugged me too. I guess he's talking about flying but it's a bit misleading to describe it like that.

 

[nrtn]

If its a plane inverted otherwise normal.

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This.

Funny thing is that I used to invert the controls for every game when I was a kid, and now I don't anymore. And I have no idea why.
Guess I played too much GoldenEye with the inverted controls back then.

 

[Kevvy Metal]

Aiming with the Wiimote, on games like Metroid Prime Trilogy basically "fixed" this for both camps.
Wiimote aiming is kinda like doing both up and down at the same time, and Y inversion immediately becomes a non-issue.

 

[Tangyn]

Inverted is how I learnt to use a controller many many moons ago and feels right to me.

That's it

 

[Azurik]

Because there are a lot of very sick individuals out there. It's a sick world we live in. Up means up for life :)

 

[Absolute]

I grew up playing sci fi flight sims like Elite so I got used to the inversion. It makes sense to me.

 

[Menchin]

What kind of monster inverts on games that aren't Ace Combat

 

[Deleted member 5491]

I find this interesting. I never think about controlling the cross-hair, just the camera, and the crosshair landing on things is more of a secondary effect.

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I mean, some Console-FPS allow you to aim and look around separately and aiming with a crosshair is just like moving something on a 2d plane. But looking around in a 3D room, on a controller(!) is something different and I need my inverted Y-axis. On PC with a mouse, in a FPS, I wanna move my crosshair in the same direction as my mouse

 

[King Picollo]

I'm a dirty inverter as my friends like to say. I believe it comes from early flying games with old style joysticks that just translated to the thumbsticks when consoles came out.

 

[eXistor]

Always invert for everything: first person, third person, vehicles, aiming, whatever.

 

[Scruffy8642]

Worse thing about going back to play older games is when they have inverted as the default with no way to change it...

 

[xEik]

I invert Y for third person but not for first person or when aiming a gun. Some games have different options for those cases.
If they don't offer separate options, I either suck at moving while in third person or suck at aiming.
Even in games that offer separate options, the transition between modes can get some awkward camera movement from me.
I blame playing old games on consoles with pad and old FPS with a mouse on PC.

 

[gebler]

I always used inverted Y until a few years ago, when I switched to non-inverted for good. I believe it was Ni No Kuni that made me change - in addition to the normal camera controls, it had a first-person view that frequently made me move the camera in the wrong direction when using inverted Y. I decided to give non-inverted controls a try, and once I got used to it, it now felt right in both normal and first-person view. I recalled having similar issues with some other games in the past, so I decided to continue using non-inverted, and it's been pretty great! The only snag this far was the Jak & Daxter HD Remaster, which has some auxiliary controls that work more like inverted Y and can't be changed (a little like my original Ni No Kuni problem in reverse).

 

[Shinrou]

Always inverting Y.

 

[Symphony]

If I can't invert Y I'm not playing your game, it's also extremely annoying when the option is there but the game won't let you set Options before you start and then locks menu access until X amount of the way through a tutorial.

But then PS2 came along and many games gave no option for inverted (TimeSplitters IIRC) so I adapted to non-inverted controls and now that's what I'm used to.

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TimeSplitters absolutely did, the reason I became an inverted player was because of that series. TS1 actually was the opposite, it had no option to un-invert (2 and FP did, but it still was by default).

 

[Patazord]

I played inverted before but since the 360/ps3 era i'm playing non inverted, i don't remember which game forced me to do it, now i can't get back to it.

 

[Zephy]

Non inverted except for planes or flying characters.

I can confirm from personal experience that it's at least partly a question of habit. Back in PS2 days, I would play with Y or even X axis inverted depending on the game with no strong feeling one way or the other. It was with PS360 gen that I settled with the non inverted controls for good because I mostly played western games and those usually had non inverted controls by default. Now I can't play a game with inverted. I had to play the orignal FFXII on an emulator because of this.

 

[EvilBoris]

Inverted in first person, normal in 3rd person for me

 

[Kureransu]

The reason I have to do inverted is because the camera isn't moving up, it's pivoting from a central axis. If the screen panned when i looked around then I'd play standard.

 

[rudeboyoslo]

I played BG&E HD on PS3 last year and that somehow doesn't have the option to invert, and I managed to play that to the end but it never stopped being an issue for me. I was forever moving the camera the wrong way

The option to invert should be in every game, port and remaster from now on. It's a basic accessibility option

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I literally gave BG&E a lower score back when I was reviewing games for not having an invert option. I made a major point of it in my review, and I still stand by it today.

 

[Zampano]

I used to invert. I think for me it was coming from big joysticks on old home computers.

I stopped inverting because Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Remastered on PS3 wouldn't let me so I learned how to use a controller correctly.

 

[FlintSpace]

Depends upon the first game that made them habitual. Nothing more. Same logic as controller vs KBM

 

[Nooblet]

First line is already wrong, imho.
I don't know anyone who inverts upwards MOVEMENT. It's exclusively for camera controls (be it in 3rd or 1st Person), i.e. LOOKING.

I grew up with playing First Person space sims with a joystick. You pull back to make the plane / cockpit look up.

And honestly, pushing the stick "up" is a misnomer. When holding a controller, the controller is held mostly horizontally.

So people are pushing the stick FORWARD to look up or they're tilting it BACK.
And when you, in real life, wanna look up, you tilt your head BACK.
That's about the gist of it: "stick UP to point nose / eyes UP or stick BACK to tilt head BACK"

Both control schemes are perfectly legitimate, and i have no issue with non-inverted being the default, but it really grinds my gears how people are unwilling to at least understand that many people legitimately consider inverted the much more 'natural' way of controlling.

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Conversely in real life if I wanna look up I tilt my face up...as it's my face where my eyes.

So there really isn't any one solid logic to the whole thing that makes the other choice illogical like some try to make it look like, and it just comes down to preference.

 

[Gorger]

I am a strong left handed who exclusively uses arrow keys/numpad instead of wasd and I play everything with a controller inverted. I think society would have branded me satanic pretty quickly if I lived in medieval times.

 

[DisturbedSwan]

First console FPS I played was Halo: CE and during the tutorial when the game asks you to use the sticks to aim at an array of lights it told me that my Y-Axis was going to be set to inverted because that's how I moved the sticks to reach the top/bottom lights and I've stuck with it ever since. It's just how my brain works I've no idea why I do it.

If I'm using a Mouse I don't do it though, just for controllers and just the Y-Axis.

 

[Oxyrain]

I wonder if there is a slight correlation between whether a person inverts, and how the controller/joystick is oriented in free space. e.g. if a person internalizes that analogue joysticks move forward and back, rather up and down, they'll be more likely to invert.

 

[Rosebud]

Old habits, probably.

I hate inverted controls.

 

[Raonak]

I remember inverted being the norm in the ps1 generation.

I guess it is kinda weird to have inverted Y, but normal X. feels like they should both be inverted, or not.

 

[Buff Beefbroth]

Do people who invert their look up/down thumbstick controls also invert their mouselook?

 

[Eoin]

If I can't invert Y I'm not playing your game, it's also extremely annoying when the option is there but the game won't let you set Options before you start and then locks menu access until X amount of the way through a tutorial.

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Yeah, I'm not sure what developers feel like they're achieving by hiding that option away until some way through a game. I hate every single second of having to play non-inverted and end up constantly pausing to check to see whether the game has finally decided to allow me to play with inverted controls.

It's not super-common, but is is mystifying when it happens and although that game might go on to play perfectly fine, it means that my first impression of it is that it's an amateur shambles.

 

[BradleyLove]

I disagree with the assertion in the article. For me, non-inverters are controlling the crosshairs, with inverters like myself controlling the gun/head/camera.

Interestingly enough, my 5-year old son has recently took an interest in video games, specifically Battlefront. He was getting incredibly frustrated with the controls until I set them to inverted Y. I had changed them to non-inverted as I thought he'd find that easier.

So this suggests to me inversion is not a learned thing.

 

[Buttons]

I always invert my controls, I can't play a game if it does not have the options. Guess it's because most of the first PSOne games had it by default back then.

 

[Maligna]

If Golden Eye was your first shooter, you probably play inverted because of it.

 

[Jimnymebob]

With me it's a mix of old games often having inverted as default (a lot of 3D games on PS2 had inverted X as well, though I don't use that much nowadays), and the fact I used to use the ball mouse on the Amiga on my hand a lot of times, so obviously I'd roll it down to move the cursor up, and vice versa.

 

[Fliesen]

Conversely in real life if I wanna look up I tilt my face up...as it's my face where my eyes.

So there really isn't any one solid logic to the whole thing that makes the other choice illogical like some try to make it look like, and it just comes down to preference.

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Which is why i said, both are legitimate and logical.
non inverted "push the stick up to move their line of sight up"
inverted "tilt the stick back to tilt their head back"

Neither is illogical

 

[Deleted member 33533]

I only invert vertical camera controls and leave horizontal controls default. I think, I associate it with how your head pivots on your neck. Like imaging if your head and neck were the control stick: when you look up, you lean your head back and you tilt your head forward to look down. Left and right are still the same though.

 

[Deleted member 21996]

Inverted for mouse, non inverted for controller. It's just what you're used to I think

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Other way around for me. Joystick inverted too. The earliest 3D vector first person games had inverted controls and it must've stuck with me from there. Arcade flyers like Space Harrier, Afterburner and Thundercross all popularised this method further. Frankly, if you're of a certain age it's more surprising if you don't invert Y axis.

 

[dedge]

I'm glad people mentioned things like tilting your head back etc because that's what makes sense to me for using inverted. If I really have to I can adjust to "normal" but I'll always invert if possible. It definitely does date back to the 90s when cutting my teeth with Goldeneye etc.

 

[Iron Eddie]

If its a plane inverted otherwise normal.

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That's how I roll too.

 

[Radarscope1]

Cool article and a nice idea for reported story talking to scientists about this.

It would be helpful if people would read the excerpts the OP posted rather than just jumping in to say if you invert or not. There have been 5,648 threads about that already.

Oh, so you see it as controlling their head while I think of it as controlling their eyes. Makes sense.

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Yes this is what the article and excepts say.

This article needs to be posted every time this topic comes up from now on!

 

[Euler007]

Only for a plane.

 

[Foot]

It's how many, many games on PS2 had their controls by default. Often unchangeable! So it was what I learned. Then one day I got a PS4 and everything was opposite day!!!

 

[Yarbskoo]

If it's a shooter, it can't be inverted (aim camera).

If it's a third person action game, inverted y is acceptable only if x is also inverted (orbit camera).

If it's a flight sim, tilt back is pitch up, tilt right is roll right.

 

[Moff]

I move my head forward to look down, that feels natural to me.

 

[Tobor]

Invert Y every time. It's the only correct way to play any game in 3D space with a stick.

My nephew learned the annoying incorrect method and when we are playing games we have to keep resetting the controls to pass the controller back and forth.

 

[Digital Savior]

IDK, the whole controlling the avatar can be constrewed too. If I jab a stick through the head, why couldn't up be up if I was grabbing it from the front?

I usually play normal. Planes are fine inverted. Black Flag swimming was better inverted too.

 

[dunkzilla]

Original FFXII release pissed me off so much with the inverted horizontal movement. I just couldn't get used to it.

IDK, the whole controlling the avatar can be constrewed too. If I jab a stick through the head, why couldn't up be up if I was grabbing it from the front?

I usually play normal. Planes are fine inverted. Black Flag swimming was better inverted too.

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This is generally how I feel when playing. I'm usually thinking I'm controlling the characters head even in third person. Up looks up, etc.

 

[5pectre]

But what happens when you move your right hand left and right?

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you don't do that while aiming a riffle. if you want to change your aim along the x axis you move your upper body so that your sights are still down the barrel

 

[Naked Snake]

I've always played inverted too (I also invert camera rotation X-Axis), was also surprised a while back when I saw this poll on Twitter and saw that a small minority of people do it (apparently more inverters on Era than Twitter):