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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't remember if this was the game or not, but I tend to set the settings ahead of time, and I specifically recall a game getting to this sort of in-game mechanic of look up/ look down and reversing the setting I had previously set because it assumed I didn't already choose what I wanted (e.g. it re-inverted my reverted settings back to "normal").
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadI 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.
Also, you can make completely irrelevent analogies in the other direction too.
E.g. When you're looking at the cinema and want to move your eyes to look at the top, where do do you move them? You move them up.
Most people prefer to play where up means up, which makes complete sense.
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 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.
It just makes sense that way. I can't adjust.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager%27s_Air_Combat
(/s, obviously. No actual offense intended to anyone who operates this way...)
“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.
The camera should feel natural, and you should be able to do it without thinking. So just let your subconscious pick.
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.
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.