When up means down: why do so many video game players invert their controls?
0Reported today on The Guardian Technology
For the full article visit: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/feb/28/why-do-video-game-players-invert-the-controls
When up means down: why do so many video game players invert their controls?
This is a genuinely fraught topic: is it generational, habitual, or explained by neuroscience? I asked the experts
Imagine you are playing a video game where you're looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick?
If the answer is "up", you're in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. Most, but not all. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting "Invert Y axis", which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago. But why the perceptual difference? Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell us about this schism?
It turns out there is very little research in this area, which is a surprise considering two billion people play games on a regular basis – and as I have discovered on social media, many of them are extremely invested in this issue. However, two of the academics I spoke to about inversion were happy to speculate on what might be happening – and both allowed for one very straightforward possibility: it's habitual.
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
A lot of people who invert the Y axis do so because the games they started playing had that control set-up as the default option. This is especially true of older ga