I don’t know if I play inverted or non-inverted because I use a mouse.
When you look up and down in a game, do you imagine that you’re moving the back of the head, or the front of the head? It’s as simple at that.
It’s the X-inverters that are the weirdos…
Both?
You guys imagine heads?
Picture the axis as a line through your head. If you lift the part of the axis that goes through your nose, you lower the part of the axis that exits the back of your head. Is that confusing?
Seriously. Chuck Yeager’s Flight Simulator on MS-DOS (look it up, kids) X-Wing, TIE Fighter, etc. These are the games that ingrained the inverted Y because that’s how aircraft/spacecraft control, and they were in first person.
Now, where’s my grant money?
Except that again doesn’t explain new gamers that did not play flight sims and still prefer inverted controls.
It’s fairly rare for me to change default controls at all, but when I do it’s usually prevent from hurling.
As I said before, it depends on how you imagine the joystick the head movement of your virtual character: Are you moving the front of the head when you move the joystick, or the back of the head?
If you imagine that the joystick is directly connected to your character’s eyes, then pushing up will move your viewpoint up.
If you imagine that the joystick is attached to the back of your character’s head, like operating a camera on a tripod, then pushing up will move your viewpoint down.
I like how they do it in Portal: The narration tells you to look up, and then it sets the controls based on whether you push up or down.
I think I may have played this on my C-64. Or maybe I’m confusing it with something else.
Some people mount toilet paper in the underhand position, too. They’re wrong*, but whatever floats their boat.
;-)
*obviously kidding. They’re just unusual.
Flight sims and space games were among the first games I ever played. Inverted controls were… obvious. That’s how they should be. But when Turok (console FPS) made inverted controls its default, I wanted to barf. It felt horribly wrong.
That said, I’m probably a weirdo: I’ve been using inverted mouse scrolling since it was an option – because that’s how touch UIs work, and those are the most natural UIs we have. You push in the direction you want the document to go. IMO there’s no reason other than habit to have a mouse wheel tied to the all-but-vestigial tiny scroll bar over on the right.
This is one of those weirdly chiral things where ‘stick goes forward = elevators go down’ from the days of playing Falcon.
Or they own cats. If I hang mine overhand, at the first available opportunity it’ll get unspooled and shredded.
That’s exactly what my mom says, too :-)
My cats have always chosen other things to destroy.
It never really occurred to me that people changed the controls until playing co op Gears with a friend on the 360 one day years ago, I just always played with whatever the default was. Inverted, not inverted, never really seemed to matter much.
I’m fortunate that no cat has ever paid any attention to toilet paper. The current one does enjoy chasing a bare cardboard roll though.
What can science tell us about the assholes who gave us head bob? Err I mean, really creative and talented souls that they were.
