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+--- Thread: "Why do some gamers invert their controls?" (/Thread-Why-do-some-gamers-invert-their-controls)
"Why do some gamers invert their controls?" - NateDog - 19-09-2025
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/sep/18/why-do-some-gamers-invert-their-controls-scientists-now-have-answers-but-theyre-not-what-you-think
Quote:Five years ago, on the verge of the first Covid lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games? A majority of players push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down, and up to make them look up. But there is a sizeable minority who do the opposite, controlling their avatars like a pilot controls a plane, pulling back to go up. For most modern games, this requires going into the settings and reconfiguring the default controls. Why do they still persist?
I thought a few hardcore gamers would be interested in the question. Instead, more than one million people read the article, and the ensuing debate caught the attention of Dr Jennifer Corbett (quoted in the original piece) and Dr Jaap Munneke, then based at the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London.
Interesting article on video-games and users inverting (or avoiding inverting) controls and the science behind it.
I am quite selective with inversion while gaming. I generally go with what feels comfortable, I've had certain games where I've instantly felt uncomfortable with standard settings and inverted feels better, I've had the opposite. SW Battlefront 2 piloting was one where I found inverted much better, Battlefield varies from game to game but I think generally feels better inverted, might take a bit of time to adjust but I seem to prefer it that way. I am a bit strange too in that I have a habit of crossing my hands over each other when I game. It was something which horrified my friends when I was a teen and they pointed it out to me (which was the only way I'd ever really notice).
How about the rest of you, do any of you lean towards inverted controls?
RE: "Why do some gamers invert their controls?" - Jassassino - 19-09-2025
(19-09-2025, 03:06 PM)NateDog Wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/sep/18/why-do-some-gamers-invert-their-controls-scientists-now-have-answers-but-theyre-not-what-you-think
Quote:Five years ago, on the verge of the first Covid lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games? A majority of players push down on the controller to make their onscreen character look down, and up to make them look up. But there is a sizeable minority who do the opposite, controlling their avatars like a pilot controls a plane, pulling back to go up. For most modern games, this requires going into the settings and reconfiguring the default controls. Why do they still persist?
I thought a few hardcore gamers would be interested in the question. Instead, more than one million people read the article, and the ensuing debate caught the attention of Dr Jennifer Corbett (quoted in the original piece) and Dr Jaap Munneke, then based at the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London.
Interesting article on video-games and users inverting (or avoiding inverting) controls and the science behind it.
I am quite selective with inversion while gaming. I generally go with what feels comfortable, I've had certain games where I've instantly felt uncomfortable with standard settings and inverted feels better, I've had the opposite. SW Battlefront 2 piloting was one where I found inverted much better, Battlefield varies from game to game but I think generally feels better inverted, might take a bit of time to adjust but I seem to prefer it that way. I am a bit strange too in that I have a habit of crossing my hands over each other when I game. It was something which horrified my friends when I was a teen and they pointed it out to me (which was the only way I'd ever really notice).
How about the rest of you, do any of you lean towards inverted controls?
I remember reading the original article to this and some responses back then! Weird that now there's a journal based followup in cognitive neuroscience lmao.
Really interesting read, I'm always having this discussion with my partner who always inverts her controller scheme setup whenever we play games together (and it's a bit of a cute joke between us that everytime the controller swaps hands, the background music stops as we both pause and go immediately to options to change it lmao) so I'll definitely show her. But honestly, I'm going to keep going with my head canon on why she inverts control schemes: she was born in Australia.
RE: "Why do some gamers invert their controls?" - Bread - 19-09-2025
Quote:But there is a sizeable minority who do the opposite, controlling their avatars like a pilot controls a plane, pulling back to go up
Is this the minority though? I was very much under the impression a vast amount of players do this, and I can't think of many games I've played recently where I've had to adjust the settings to enable this. Pulling back on the stick to look up just makes sense to me. If someone were to press down on the bottom of the back of my neck, my natural reaction would be to look up. And if someone pressed at the top, I'd look down. That's just science.
People who invert the x-axis on the other hand are psychopaths and to be avoided at all times.