
posted by poffin boffin at 11:37 AM on February 28 [76 favorites]
posted by higginba at 11:38 AM on February 28 [35 favorites]
I’ve tried to train myself it off it, but cannot. The best I can do is kind of a slight off center view when steering with a mouse.
On preview, what poffin boffin said.
posted by Hactar at 11:39 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]
posted by Mrs Potato at 11:39 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]
This is a pretty serious misunderstanding in the article’s introductory paragraph. Controls never invert movement. They only invert looking.
What I find interesting is that for an orbiting-camera control, you want to invert the X-axis as well as the Y-axis, whereas for a flight simulator you only want to invert Y.
posted by Phssthpok at 11:39 AM on February 28 [12 favorites]
Descent for me, on keyboard.
Also because of how the engine calculated movement, it’s best to aggresively strafe/slide.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:40 AM on February 28 [3 favorites]
Anything else just felt completely unnatural though I suspect if I forced myself to do it the other way for an hour I’d get used to it.
posted by bondcliff at 11:40 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by mrgoat at 11:41 AM on February 28 [6 favorites]
Interesting that we can get used to up/down inversion but never would to left/right inversion though
posted by mit5urugi at 11:41 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]
posted by Jpfed at 11:41 AM on February 28
And unless you’re holding your joystick up against the wall, you’re pushing the stick forward and not up. Like when you look at the ground, you move your head forward, and you move it back when you look up. It’s not unnatural in the least.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 11:41 AM on February 28 [19 favorites]
posted by thefoxgod at 11:43 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by FishBike at 11:44 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]
But I don’t think this is true, for reasons demonic winged headgear just said.
pulling backwards on the mouse makes me look up because that’s how heads move.
posted by Just this guy, y’know at 11:44 AM on February 28 [6 favorites]
posted by mrgoat at 11:44 AM on February 28
On preview: I agree with demonic winged headgear, which is a sequence of words I am grateful to have the opportunity to put together.
posted by Horkus at 11:45 AM on February 28 [5 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:45 AM on February 28 [13 favorites]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:45 AM on February 28
For me, if I’m in a first person view , then pushing forward has a similar proprioception feel to tilting my head forward. When I tilt my head forward I look more down. This is further reinforced by real world experience with airplane yokes. I believe these elements have combined to give me a strong preference in this game/view mode.
Which may all just be tied to the lost years of my youth playing Elite on the C64. The rear firing laser works the way a majority of people apparently prefer, at least until you try a roll…
posted by meinvt at 11:45 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]
But in looking, I am not tilting my head to the right or left, I’m directing my eyes. I’m also directing my eyes up and down to look around. Yeah, if I need to widen my field of vision, I’m moving my head, but my eyes move without moving my head.
Maybe inverted look would make sense for an owl simulator.
posted by explosion at 11:46 AM on February 28
posted by Horkus at 11:48 AM on February 28 [26 favorites]
I find that funny because I am literally a pilot and I don’t invert my controls. I’ve also played sims since the original Flight Simulator and I’m perfectly comfortable flying simulators with “right” controls or arcade controls.
posted by backseatpilot at 11:49 AM on February 28 [4 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 11:49 AM on February 28 [3 favorites]
I have no trouble with the default controls on a touchscreen phone or tablet but cannot abide “natural” (i.e. touchscreen style) controls on a trackpad. Maybe that supports the acting as / acting on distinction.
posted by jedicus at 11:50 AM on February 28
posted by poffin boffin at 11:52 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
However, after playing games with inverted mouse for literally 30 years or so, I switched like 2 years ago (because of a game I really liked that didn’t have an option). It took some time to adjust but eventually became just as natural, and at this point I use non-inverted. I think I still prefer inverted with a controller, though.
Also the first thing I do setting up a mac is to turn off the godawful reverse scroll thing they put in place a few years back for the touchpad.
posted by tocts at 11:53 AM on February 28 [3 favorites]
And that man’s name? Was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
posted by The Tensor at 11:55 AM on February 28 [5 favorites]
And yeah, nthing the flight sim connection. Descent, Terminal Velocity, hell even as far back as LineWars I was using “inverted” controls because they were flying games.
Then it was easier to just keep that muscle memory than try to retrain myself.
posted by ODiV at 11:56 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by GuyZero at 11:56 AM on February 28
Having grown up almost exclusively on PC games, though, I actually don’t really like joysticks for controlling anything except flight simulators. Most of the games I like using a controller for don’t use the joysticks (most notably Spelunky, I guess).
posted by backseatpilot at 11:57 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:57 AM on February 28
Yes, but people have rationales that they’ve built up for why it feels natural. For many people it isn’t just “this is my familiar control scheme,” but “this is what makes sense.”
posted by explosion at 11:59 AM on February 28
This was my first thought, as related to joystick use, which tweaks the up/down idea a bit. On a directional pad, up is up, but on a joystick? You’re getting into 3D space.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:00 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by kaelynski at 12:01 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
Sometimes! My controller has a fairly mobile life, and I only use it at my desk. Moving the controller helps me jump, fly, run, etc., as does making that face. I don’t think of my controller usage in terms of relativity to the world around me, but as relative to the plane the buttons are mounted to. If it’s upside down and backwards, “up” on the joystick is still “up”.
posted by Zudz at 12:04 PM on February 28
You’re probably too afraid of stalling your Doom Marine.
posted by bondcliff at 12:05 PM on February 28 [5 favorites]
posted by poffin boffin at 12:05 PM on February 28 [3 favorites]
posted by codacorolla at 12:06 PM on February 28
posted by theatro at 12:07 PM on February 28
But maybe this is just like that Apple scroll thing, are you moving the viewport or the content, etc.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:07 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
The emergence of touchscreens meant that the original scrolling metaphor (pulling on the scrollbar rather than on the screen) was alien to more and more people. I think the change was well-motivated. Like you, I put it back the old way until Windows had a similar option since I was using both at that time and it was hard to switch. And then I bit the bullet and went back to the new Mac default (on both).
But yeah, to each their own.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:09 PM on February 28
Related, I now have to invert my scroll on OS X because it defaults to “using finger on tablet/phone” and not “using mouse/keyboard/touchpad on computer.” It feels super weird to me to uncheck the “Scroll direction: Natural” because Natural is, in fact, UPSIDE DOWN THANKS.
posted by potrzebie at 12:11 PM on February 28 [3 favorites]
While there may be some neurological predisposition to invert or not to invert, what would probably be more interesting to see would be the neurological effects of long-term inverting, not-inverting, or even switching.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:13 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by RobotHero at 12:14 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
In racing games, which is most of what I play that isn’t WASD/mouse, I strongly prefer accelerate/brake triggers rather than a stick.
posted by Foosnark at 12:16 PM on February 28
posted by wibari at 12:18 PM on February 28
posted by curious nu at 12:18 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:20 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by curious nu at 12:21 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
Well. let me tell ya, this might not be the right place for ya then. /s
But truly, to wit, it only feels right for me in flight games (Starfox or better yet Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge anyone? MMMMMmmmmmm) otherwise I’m a non-invert.
My main critique is that I seem to have gotten, as I age and play less, I’m far more sensitive to when FPS games don’t match controller schemes for actions like ‘interact’ or ‘menu’ or ‘grenade’ or whatnot. I basically cannot, not that I play FPS games much anymore, play two similar games/genre if the control scheme doesn’t match exactly [spolier: they rarely do] because my play session is ruined by inadvertently doing X when I mean Y (literally) and/or my brain hurts so much that it’s not fun anyhow. Why can’t there be a universally agreed upon layout of things for non-outlier type behaviors for my right thumb?!? Controllers are the same (mostly) these days!
I’m also curious how this topic (the invert thing, not my hobby horse above) applies to gamers with limited mobility, if one is better/worse/easier inherently to that population because that data point would be interesting indeed.
posted by RolandOfEld at 12:23 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
posted by team lowkey at 12:24 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
It wasn’t until what, Quake? that I wasn’t flying something with mouse or joystick.
posted by BeeDo at 12:25 PM on February 28
posted by brook horse at 12:26 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
I suspect I was just conditioned by whatever game I played first though, because there’s no logical reason for inversion with a mouse, which is all I used for years. But the conditioning is strong.
posted by stillnocturnal at 12:30 PM on February 28
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:32 PM on February 28 [3 favorites]
If your game doesn’t allow me to invert the Y axis for camera I won’t play it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:43 PM on February 28
posted by poffin boffin at 12:54 PM on February 28
posted by thecaddy at 1:01 PM on February 28 [16 favorites]
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:06 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
If you scroll downward to see further down the page, the page is fixed and portal is moving downward.
If you scroll upward to see further down the page, the portal is fixed, and you are pushing the page up through the portal.
posted by ShooBoo at 1:06 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
Descent and Descent II were the shooters I was allowed to get as a kid because you were only shooting robots. I never really got a good joystick though, just played on the keyboard peeking around corners. Funny thing is I never had much difficulty with the combat in either of those games. I stalled out because finding the keycard/switch in full 3D was just too frustrating.
posted by atoxyl at 1:07 PM on February 28
posted by atoxyl at 1:09 PM on February 28
posted by RobotHero at 1:10 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
The SmarterEveryDay guy trained himself to ride a bicycle where the handlebars worked the wrong way. It took him 8 months to master it and then he had to relearn how to ride an ordinary bicycle again.
This is personal for me because I once broke my arm trying to ride with my hands crossed-over.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:13 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
Invert your Y axis. This is the only way 🙂
posted by pleem at 1:16 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
1. If you invert the axis, it’s like the mouse is a “head” with a neck on which you rest your hand, and you need to get the “eyes” of the mouse to tilt in the right direction by virtue of adjusting the head. So, for example, if someone had a hand cupped to the back of your head, they would pull down and back (gently, of course) to make your eyes tilt “up.”
2. For non-inverted, it’s more like you are “pushing” or moving your eyesight “into” a particular direction. In this case, it’s like you control the nose of a plane by holding the nose itself, as if it can go wherever it wants to, rather than by tilting the tail down to move the nose up indirectly.
In the second case, I think the “nose of the plane” analogy works pretty good. Namely, do you move the nose of the plane around by feeling that you can move it wherever you want? Or do you move the nose around by the way in which you tilt the tail?
For me, it becomes a difference between a “pulling” versus a “pushing” idea to get the eye of the camera where you want it to line up. Like you are either pushing off towards your goal, or controlling the rudder. I think one’s preference is probably determined by which games you played early on.
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:21 PM on February 28 [3 favorites]
The “head” metaphor makes no sense, because if you affixed a thumbstick to the back of someone’s head, you’d have to push it left to push their eyes to the right. That’s an inverted X-axis, which no one’s suggesting.
posted by explosion at 1:28 PM on February 28 [2 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 1:31 PM on February 28
Does a similar thing happen if you switch between inverted / non-inverted controls in games? I’ve definitely noticed that over time, it’s become easier for me to pick up new control schemes, especially in the age of console ports that lack good remapping functionality.
posted by mrgoat at 1:36 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
That’s how it feels, but unless I’m getting flight wrong (which is very possible), the pilot’s forward/backward motion doesn’t control the direction of the plane’s nose; they are controlling the angles of the rear wing surfaces, which control its lift and drag.
This gif from Wikipedia’s flight control surfaces entry shows that the forward/backward directions are part of the mechanism connecting the stick to the elevators.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:39 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by mwhybark at 1:41 PM on February 28
posted by BeeDo at 1:41 PM on February 28
and i should note that in taildraggers, you must first lift the tail off the ground by lowering the nose while rolling forward on the runway to reduce drag enough to achieve airspeed. so one actually does push forward on the stick at first.
posted by mwhybark at 1:46 PM on February 28
And here’s the funny bit: I do it both ways. I have the touchpad scrolling direction reversed on some of my computers but not others. I manage to use each on its respective computer, but if I were to reverse the direction on a particular computer I would get confused. I don’t even remember which is the “default” behavior.
And both can be supported by a mental model:
Downward motion on touchpad shows points towards the top of a document = moving a mobile document underneath a motionless window;
Downward motion on touchpad shows points towards the bottom of a document = moving a mobile window over a motionless document.
On a touchscreen, though, I have to use the moving document underneath a motionless window model.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:48 PM on February 28
Not sure what the first FPS would’ve been to use mouse-look.
Funnily enough, like DevilsAdvocate above mentions, I can switch between Mac and PC for document scrolling but in games it feels so alien…
(Also, Fizz, you’re doing good work with all these gaming threads. Thank you.)
posted by slimepuppy at 1:58 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by goddess_eris at 2:08 PM on February 28
Video games don’t give you that feedback, you’re just looking at screen that has an top that is up and a bottom that is down. If it weren’t for those early flight simulators, who knows if the shooters would have adopted that style.
posted by team lowkey at 2:40 PM on February 28
posted by zinon at 2:43 PM on February 28
Bizarrely, if I’m playing a Playstation game and it wants me to use circle instead of X to do the basic action, it completely freaks me out and I have trouble wrapping my head around it. But it feels totally natural when I’m playing a game on the Switch. Brains are weird.
posted by thecaddy at 3:03 PM on February 28
posted by biffa at 4:04 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
This causes me consternation when I have to use my wife’s Mac for a moment or two, as she uses the “natural” setting.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 4:30 PM on February 28
So then I thought, is this a rotation vs translation thing? But no, when doing mouse look/aim I do not invert the Y axis. And perhaps more weirdly, in Kerbal Space Program, my keyboard controls for rotation and translation both have the Y axis inverted. Or is it a matter of whether the thing being controlled is ‘towards/away’ vs ‘up/down’? That seemed like a better fit except for that F-14 display, which I would still find confusing it it was oriented horizontally instead of vertically.
I think the best I can do is say it depends on my mental model of what imaginary thing the physical input device is directly hooked up to, and what does that do. And when the game does not provide a reference for that directly, maybe I’m just using whatever one seems most similar from another context.
Joystick control for an imaginary plane that has a control stick? It should move the same way the imaginary one does. Aiming by moving the end of a gun barrel around? The mouse should move in the same direction the end of the gun does. And by ‘should’ I mean how it works for me, not what anyone else should do. This might tie in with the scrolling thing as well–do the scroll controls move a window over a stationary document, or do they move the document behind the stationary window?
posted by FishBike at 4:33 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
Descent was so good. That and TIE fighter/X-Wing put me pretty firmly in camp “invert”
posted by ethand at 4:50 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
But when I think about it too much it confuses me and now I think maybe i’m wrong. so i always have to figure out everytime whether i invert or not, but I’m pretty sure i invert Y. I think for X it depends if I’m moving an object like a pivot point (picture a standing machine gun) or moving my character to look. IDK. shits weird.
posted by symbioid at 4:53 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by symbioid at 4:53 PM on February 28
posted by Literaryhero at 5:05 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
And yet, on a sailboat you can have a tiller or a wheel and generally have no problem.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:08 PM on February 28
posted by Chitownfats at 5:20 PM on February 28
You are misunderstanding the metaphor. It applies best to using the mouse. You imagine your hand is on top of the character’s head so you push the mouse foreword to look down and turn the mouse left to look left.
The analogy doesn’t work quite as well with a joystick because you push it left rather than rotate to the left but you imagine your thumb is sitting on top of the character’s head, not on a lever sticking out the back of their head. Push the head forward to look down and push over toward the left to look left.
I invert my mouse and one reason it makes sense to me is that it doesn’t require a translation. If you don’t invert the mouse, at some level you are imagining your desktop oriented like a wall in front of you so that pushing the mouse forward is actually pushing it up, pushing the POV up rather than forward. With the mouse inverted you are imagining your hand is in the same plane as it would be in the game world on top of the character’s head.
posted by straight at 5:31 PM on February 28
It’s fascinating that Nintendo thought the whole idea of a movable POV in a 3D game was so weird that they felt the need to embody it in the game world.
posted by straight at 5:40 PM on February 28
I don’t blame Descent for my mouse-inverting ways since I never played it with a mouse, but it is why I’m hooked on using EADF instead of WASD. My scheme for controlling 6 degrees of freedom with a keyboard involved resting my fingers on the home row like I was typing and I’ve been rebinding controls to match ever since. (AutoHotKey is my very good friend.)
But one good side effect of having to always rebind keys to play a game is that I end up always setting them consistently so that INTERACT or CROUCH or FLASHLIGHT or GRENADE are always where I expect them to be. A bad side effect is if I have to use a controller or something where I can’t make the controls work like I expect I get a huge case of the clumsy broken brain you describe.
posted by straight at 6:10 PM on February 28
That was discussed earlier. Are you moving the page or a “view” over the page? Traditional UI for computers uses a scroll-bar to move a view up or down. But touch-screen UI moves the page itself up or down. These are opposite motions.
With regard to the inverted y-axis control, I think it’s crucial to be clear on the three axes of rotation. For an airplane, it’s pitch (tilt forward/backward), roll (tilt leftward/rightward), and yaw (rotate leftward/rightward).
Roll makes sense for an airplane—in fact, it’s a necessary consequence of the aircraft control surfaces and the nature of winged flight.
In contrast, roll makes almost no sense, or at the least is virtually useless, with regard to human sight. Roll corresponds to the tilting of the head, which we almost never need to do to understand and navigate in the world.
The control for pitch and roll on an airplane is the flight-stick (or yoke). But the control for yaw on an airplane is the rudder, an independent control, often in the form of foot pedals that move forward and back in coordination but opposite each other.
Crucially, while yaw doesn’t necessarily alter the direction of motion of a plane (an airplane can crab forward), roll necessarily alters the direction of motion as well as orientation on two of the three axes, by virtue of how winged flight works.
Keeping in mind that to turn right, the plane will both roll (tilt) rightward and rotate rightward, a rightward tilt of a stick or a rightward twist of the steering-wheel-like yoke makes sense. So, assuming we’re going to combine pitch and roll in the same control (a control which would then require two degrees of motion), what makes sense for pitch? Well, notice that with roll the stick’s orientation mirrors the tilt of the yaw axis—that is to say, you can think of the stick’s tilt as the plane’s axial tilt (they’ll be parallel or coincident lines). The forward/backward tilt which we call pitch can either be parallel to the stick’s forward/backward tilt, or equal but opposite. The more intuitive configuration is for it to be parallel, as well. In this configuration, the stick will in all cases be parallel with the up/down axis of the plane (or your upright spine), both with regard to roll and pitch.
In contrast, since we typically don’t roll/tilt our heads left/right for any reason, but we do rotate our heads left/right around the axis of our spine/neck, comparable to yaw, the question becomes: if for vision we don’t really ever need roll, but we do need pitch and yaw, and we’re combining two independent degrees of motion on one controller—which is efficient and which both a controller stick and a mouse can perform—then it makes sense to retain the flight-stick paradigm for pitch, but not invert for yaw. Or, equally sensible, ditch the flight-stick paradigm entirely and, assuming one is holding the controller so it’s parallel to the plane of one’s face, to have up/down and left/right stick motion to match the up/down of pitch and the left/right of yaw.
The people who are arguing for the intuitive nature of an inverted-y as matching the rotation of the head are not being consistent because, if they were, then the stick would cause roll (tilt left/right) in the image (or, at least, they’d invert the x-axis for yaw, as well, analogous to a stick on the back of someone’s head). But no one needs roll for vision yet they definitely need yaw.
Note that it also makes sense to invert both the x and y axes for the third-person view because, in that case, you can think of the viewpoint as moving around the surface of a sphere aimed at the player character at the center.
No inversion at all—the modern configuration—corresponds to the opposite of the fully-inverted version; that is to say, it’s like having a stick coming out the front of the head. You’re leading the viewpoint “by the nose”, so to speak.
Inverting only one axis, the y axis, might seem strange but it is very intuitive for the control stick/yoke of an airplane because a left/right bank, due to the nature of the control surfaces and flight, always combines both roll and yaw. (But yaw can be independent!)
To sum, the preference for only an inverted y is the result of three things: 1) this is very intuitive for controlling an airplane, 2) the stick(s) on game controllers evolved from mechanically-equivalent joysticks similar to what is used in aircraft, and 3) flight-simulation games preceded first- and third-person view games and so older gamers most likely first used a stick controller for flight simulation and they retained that preference for first- and third-person views.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:11 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
posted by pompomtom at 6:17 PM on February 28
That doesn’t apply as much to moving a mouse as you’re actually rotating the mouse (the axis being the heel of your hand) for yaw rather than just pushing it in a direction. And I suspect a significant number of joystick-inverters carry it over from having been mouse-inverters.
posted by straight at 6:18 PM on February 28
posted by zengargoyle at 6:25 PM on February 28
That makes sense…but a little bit not. If the axis is at the heel of the hand, the movement necessarily traces an arc. This mostly may not matter, I’m not sure. I know that I’ve thought of mouse yaw control as a purely left/right line and not an arc, but I’ve not observed how I actually play. But I’m a Quake keyboard + inverted mouselook person.
I did buy Ultima Underground when it came out—I was very, very excited about FPV gaming—but I don’t recall how the controls were set there. I didn’t play it that much. I also bought Descent when it was released, but didn’t play that much, either. But I was a very early adopter FPS gamer and inverted y mouselook with keyboard strafing set my mindset forever.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:48 PM on February 28
posted by Merus at 6:50 PM on February 28
Your hand/arm holding a mouse is literally pivoting the same way you pivot your head when you look left and right. The idea of mentally abstracting that movement to linear motion and then translating the line back into an arc in your mental model of the game world seems deeply strange.
posted by straight at 7:10 PM on February 28
I set mine the other way, I roll away from me to scroll further along the page. Why? Because I’m pushing the text further up in the window while I scroll. Or I’m pulling it down when I go back up the page. Metaphors are fun!
posted by hippybear at 7:25 PM on February 28
This would be true if mouse input only worked on one axis. An arc is one-dimensional. The mouse movements on the two-dimensional surface represent two-dimensional input: a mouse arc, pivoting around the heel or elbow, results in two independent inputs and, where both are bound, results in both yaw (looking left/right) and pitch (looking up/down), which is not the desired result in your arc equivalent to head-turning argument, which is yaw alone. If the y-axis of the mouse movement isn’t bound to any game input, assuming that’s possible, then you’d get your desired result at the cost of reducing input describing a plane to input describing a line.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:52 PM on February 28
I think it’s a bit more complex than that. Look down at my own hand with standard Y-up controls.. if the heel of my hand is sitting on my desk my fingers will do different things to keep the horizontal line straight. Heel of hand up.. all the joints of the arm work to keep the mouse moving in a straight line. Arcing the mouse would be a bad habit that would have you shooting over people’s heads in an FPS…
I don’t think the head of my character really enters into my mental model when playing an FPS, the mouse is obviously moving the gun around.
If I had to liken the feel of horizontal mousing it to anything I’d say it’s some combination of dragging window around where the center of the window is the deadly part and maybe rolling a cylinder back and forth across the desk. (I guess you could imagine the view port is wrapped around the cylinder and the part against the desk is the part I see.. and extrapolate from there to a ball.)
For me though, flight always inverted, first person mouse or right analog stick always Y-forward is up. Third person right analog stick I have no preferences for since that thing has done so many things over the years that I’m okay moving the camera or the character.
The first mouselook 3d game I played was… I honestly can’t remember, it must have been Quake 1 or Duke3D but I’m sure I was using keyboard to look up and down on those games when I first played them.
Up until then the only games I played where you could usefully look up and down were flight sims and space sims and whatever Descent is. I could see how going from those to a game that was Y-forward down might set things but I’ve never even played Goldeneye.
posted by yonega at 8:21 PM on February 28 [1 favorite]
The metaphor is that you are reading from top to bottom so you scroll down the page to read more of it.
posted by ODiV at 8:22 PM on February 28
posted by hippybear at 8:26 PM on February 28
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:40 PM on February 28
posted by the duck by the oboe at 10:54 PM on February 28
I have a very strong sense memory of this from my one, abortive attempt to operate a studio broadcast television video camera during my local PBS station’s live fundraising telethon. I was so jumpy from the director’s impatience for haste, I anticipated and performed a large and fast repositioning while my camera was still live. That was 38 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:06 PM on February 28
In all seriousness, inverted joystick for life, thanks. Even X axis inversion was great until games started using the joystick as a virtual mouse cursor, making for a nightmare of mode confusion.
posted by wierdo at 12:26 AM on February 29
People should feel free to play how they like to play and I hope that programmers continue to retain this option as a setting, it makes for a more accessible game.
I personally do not invert controls or camera movement, as it just messes with how I perceive up and down when playing a simulation, but I’m glad it’s there for those that need it.
posted by Fizz at 11:32 AM on February 28 [18 favorites]