Why Do Some Gamers Invert Their Controls?

Because we started on a flight-sim?

Disclosure: Didn’t read. But I did always get heckled at gatherings for inverting my controls, and then forgetting to switch them back. I think it came from whatever console you started with first (Sega Saturn), if you played early PC joystick games (Tie Fighter!), and Goldeneye’s Solitare configuration, which allowed deadly accuracy without needing to invoke the crosshairs.

I inverted mine because I grew up on joystick games like Falcon

I like them inverted for ships/vehicles but not for first person cameras, if that makes any sense. Surely I'm not alone?

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.

When you grab the back of a person’s head tightly, and want to make them look up, which direction do you pull?

I grew up on N64, which had inverted axes. Nintendo continued that tradition for the longest time.

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 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.

Inverted Y axis means that the stick mirrors my head movements.

I invert (Clair Obscur most recently) because I'm controlling the camera. If I want to look to the left, the camera has to move to the right. I can't play third-person any other way and I have tried!

For me it was because I'm right handed and if I was holding a gun with both hands I'd move my right hand down to aim up.

It just makes sense that way. I can't adjust.

Chuck Yeager made me do it! Or maybe it was EA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat

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

> 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.

For me at least, the answer is very easy: play the game without changing the settings. If you repeatedly turn the wrong direction, switch.

The camera should feel natural, and you should be able to do it without thinking. So just let your subconscious pick.

I don't play video games but I invert the trackpad scroll direction on macOS. I cannot understand people who use the default "natural" scrolling, it's anything but natural, and it's baffling that it's the default.

Why do I always invert the Y-axis but never the X-axis?

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.

~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...

I'm not surprised. I have introduced several people to gaming, both adults and children. I let them all start with the default settings, and I don't even tell them there are settings. Then I observe their movements. I observe whether they consistently (or very often) start looking the wrong way before correcting. If they do that a lot, I change the settings, and it's smooth sailing from there.

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.

Played flight simulator with a controller and invert on a controller for any 3D game. Don't invert with a mouse and keyboard on a computer. For me, preference was based on gaming experience.

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.

I will never understand these people who invert their camera controls, especially in something like Dark Souls. You are playing as a knight not an airplane.

It drives ma absolutely bananas that you cannot easily invert your mouse wheel direction in either Windows or Macos.

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.

The two main premises here are flawed.

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 REALLY wish this was a setting I could set once on my computer and ALL games respected it. I prefer inverted X and Y but there’s SO many games out there that just don’t provide this as a setting. I’ve tried playing with non-inverted but I end up just getting frustrated and stopping.

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.

Wayyyyy back in the day, I got a copy of Descent.

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.

Of course for those who learned the "correct" controls from aviation, the real question is why planes have the stick "inverted" and how that tradition started.

I am somewhat weird among my peers in this respect: I invert Y on joystick controls only (and leave it as default for mouse controls). Probably there are other people who do this - it certainly makes sense to me - but almost everyone else (invert-Y or not) seems to find this odd when I actually discuss it.

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 I got my first Xbox, I had hell playing Halo and Call of Duty, until I found the look inversion in settings. I immediately got better at playing. My friends hated it when I came over to play on their console because I always screwed with their controller settings.

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.

Huh. I always thought it was far simpler: back in the day we loved flight sims and joysticks. Then our D-pad console controllers got joysticks. So naturally the devs went with what they knew. The rest is just inertia.

We were playing CoD zombies with my father in law the other day, and he was really struggling with the overall concept of the two joysticks for moving and looking. I realised he was consistently expecting the joystick to go the opposite way (up/down) compared to what it was actually doing. I said you have to push up to look up.

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.

There is a good reason given for why flight controls are "inverted" buried somewhere in those "The Secret of Flight" videos by Alexander Lippisch:

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

> “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.”

> 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.

Seems super light on details, I guess I'm supposed to read the paper that's not linked? Not sure why this has to be new journalist and scientific research, couldn't you just ask Microsoft for some Halo stats and call it a day?

Some have pilot controls and some have eye aim

Because some people understand how to setup controls properly.

I play games but not that often. What I find puzzling is that whenever I start out in a new first-person perspective game, it takes me a while to even figure out something’s wrong. I can play uninverted-Y just about well enough to not immediately notice.

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.

I invert vertical axis always, and I’m on the camp of first being exposed to flight simulators for games.

Using regular configuration feels wrong.

There's a classic experiment of which variations have been done for almost a century now. Put on goggles that use mirrors to flip vision upside down. People adjust much faster than one might think. Minutes to hours. Those who have worn them for multiple days report that the world stops looking upside down with them. Wear them long enough and the world looks upside down when they're taken off.

Because that's what my uncle taught me on his PC in the early 90s

Because their heads are screwed on backwards. Duh.

(/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)

Interesting conclusion. My wife struggles with controls in 3d games and is notably not a shape-rotator, but she is a great illustrator. On the other hand, I can assemble ikea blindfolded, but cannot even approximate a human form on paper. Maybe she should try inverted.

The physical movement of "looking upwards" involves a muscle (your neck) going down

This feels so obvious to me as an inverter.

I specifically prefer inverted controls in third person (tilting the stick up moves the camera up, so to point at the character it must then tilt the view down), but non-inverted controls in first person (tilting up points my view up).

I really feel like the result regarding "non inverters were faster" probably won't replicate and was just this group of researchers needing to produce some kind of tangible result from their research. It just doesn't add up.

I think mostly I'm just used to it. Maybe inverted-Y was a common default at some point.

For me, context is important. Simulated fight? I can only play with inverted Y axis. Everything else, I’m completely useless with inverted Y.

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.

I invert Y axis in games, disable "natural" scroll on touchpads, and ride a skateboard goofy.