"Why do some gamers invert their controls?"

[NateDog]

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/s...-you-think

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?