Why inverted controls are better

It had been a couple of months since I had last played, so my first few matches were spent refamiliarizing myself with the controls. Usually, muscle memory reigns supreme, but this time around, I was having difficulty in aiming — specifically, aiming horizontally. After a few frustrating matches and even more deaths , I decided to try switching to non-inverted controls.

And you know what? I wound up being the match MVP. Thus, I think that learning to use a controller with a sufficiently high degree of skill is likely to involve the development of a fairly ingrained mapping between input and expected action. But habitual use is not the only possibility. Inverting or not inverting may also involve differences in spatial perception and the interpretation of information on a screen. One theory involves how the player perceives their relationship with the character or vehicle they are controlling.

So one way of interpreting this could be that the non-inverters are fully inhabiting the avatar as a body, while the inverters are controlling it as a vehicle. This would suggest that non-inverters are more immersed in the experience, but Corbett disputes this. Also, many inverters feel that inverting the Y-axis actually brings us closer to human movement because we tilt our heads backwards to look up and forwards to look down.

Corbett suggests we could also look at other areas of our technology use for comparisons. This results in a slight ghettoisation of players that prefer inverted controls. However there is almost a universal agreement on inversion of controls in games that feature flying vehicles, such as helicopters and planes , because in such situations the analog stick will simulate a flight stick.

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This process takes no more than a few hours and we'll send you an email once approved. Overview Up is down! Controversy The inversion of camera controls is a controversial subject in some gaming groups, since playing with controls that are the opposite of what the user finds intuitive very quickly becomes a huge annoyance. Tweet Clean. Corbett was inspired to look into the matter further with a full study. It's not the normal topic her team would study in their lab, she explains to The Guardian, but Covid has forced many experiments to go online.

Employing the help of volunteer gamers between 18 and 35, the team will measure how fast and accurately the players can rotate shapes and "the extent to which they rely on different body and contextual cues" when making these instinctive decisions, Dr. Corbett explains. With this study, Corbett hopes to gain insight as to how inverting controls affects the player's interactions with both real and virtual environments because, in the previous article, evidence suggested that those who prefer inverting were less immersed in the in-game world.