inverted

If you’re like me, one of the first things you do when booting up a game is checking out the options in the Settings menu. From audio to subtitles, brightness to performance, you’re fine-tuning the particulars to ensure the game is playing just right for you. Maybe during this, you’re also changing your controller settings from “normal” to “inverted,” and if you’ve ever wondered why you do that, well, science may have an answer for you.

In a new scientific paper reported on by The Guardian (via Eurogamer), Dr. Jennifer Corbett and Dr. Jaap Munneke at Brunel University London have sought to study the neuroscience behind a player’s choice of “normal” or “inverted” controls. Titled “Why axis inversion? Optimising interactions between users, interfaces, and visual displays in 3D environments,” the duo discovered that there are a variety of factors that go into your decision of opting for a particular controller setting in games, and it seems to primarily revolve around how your brain perceives objects in 3D spaces.

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Initiated during lockdown and published this month, Corbett and Munneke concluded in the study that “personal experiences, favourite games, different genres, age, consoles, which way you scroll with a mouse … all of these things could potentially be involved” in why you choose to invert your controls in-game or not.

“Many people told us that playing a flight simulator, using a certain type of console, or the first game they played were the reasons they preferred to invert or not,” Corbett said. “Many also said they switched preferences over time. We added a whole new section to the study based on all this feedback.”

To understand the phenomenon, Corbett and Munneke asked participants in the study to complete a questionnaire to understand their background and partake in an experiment around spatial awareness.

“They had to mentally rotate random shapes, take on the perspective of an ‘avatar’ object in a picture, determine which way something was tilted in differently tilted backgrounds, and overcome the typical ‘Simon effect’ where it’s harder to respond when a target is on the opposite vs. the same side of the screen as the response button,” Corbett said. “Then we used some machine-learning algorithms to help us sort through all this survey and experiment data and pick out what combination of all of these things best explained whether someone inverted.”

According to Corbett, the assumptions for why people prefer inverted controls were wrong. Instead, the biggest determining factor was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect.

“The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert,” Corbett said. “People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks. Though [non-inverters] tended to be faster, they didn’t get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate.”

Essentially, just because a flight simulator may have been your first experience with a game doesn’t mean you’re inherently an inverter. Similarly, just because you’ve always played with normal controller settings doesn’t mean you’re a non-inverter either. In fact, according to the study and Corbett’s musings, switching your preferences could make you a better gamer.

“Non-inverters should give inversion a try–and inverters should give non-inversion another shot,” Corbett said. “You might even want to force yourself to stick with it for a few hours. People have learned one way. That doesn’t mean they won’t learn another way even better. A good example is being left-handed. Until the mid-20th century, left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand, causing some people to have lifelong handwriting difficulties and learning problems. Many older adults still don’t realise they’re naturally left-handed and could write/draw much better if they switched back.”

Next time you’re contemplating your controller settings, whether you should go with your preference (either inverting or not inverting), you may want to reconsider the other option. It could help you last longer in Battlefield 6 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.

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To invert or not to invert? The question of whether to flip the Y-axis in games is often answered with recollections of childhood habits and/or varyingly smug declarations of which joystick setting is ‘better’. Now, though, a cognitive research study posits that our control preferences are less about whether or not we played GoldenEye after school and more about the innate quirks of our brains.

As reported by Keith Stuart at The Guardian, Dr Jennifer Corbett and Dr Jaap Munneke’s paper ‘Why axis inversion? Optimizing interactions between users, interfaces, and visual displays in 3D environments’ details their experiments into control inversion choices. After answering a questionnaire about whether and why they think they use invert controls or not, participants were tasked to, as Corbett puts it, “mentally rotate random shapes, take on the perspective of an ‘avatar’ object in a picture, determine which way something was tilted in differently tilted backgrounds, and overcome the typical ‘Simon effect’ where it’s harder to respond when a target is on the opposite v the same side of the screen as the response button.”

These experiments, the study claims, indicated that none of the participants’ stated reasons for rejecting or embracing inversion “had anything to do” with their actual choice. “It turns out,” Corbett says, “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.”

Or, as Stuart puts it, “It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space.” And the speed factor doesn’t mean that electing to invert is a skill issue either, as the study adds that while non-inverters would flip their images at a faster pace, they’d make more mistakes than the cautious inverters, resulting in an overall equal accuracy rate.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

I suspect my C grade in GCSE Biology isn’t quite enough to let me give a learned interpretation of these findings, but it sure sounds like the desire to invert is based mainly on unconscious brainworkings – hardly sure footing for any “No, MY way is better” reasoning. Though on a personal level it’s nice to know, as someone who’s always inverted the Y axis on thumbstick controls but can’t remember a reason why, that I don’t actually need a reason. It’s just how I perceive objects in 3D space, guys. I shall continue to go around gaming trade shows, flipping the sticks at all the demo booths and forgetting to reset them, thus leaving a trail of harmless inconveniences like a hallway full of slightly tilted paintings. And it’ll all be fine, because it was basically an accident of birth.

Then again, the study doesn’t entirely reject the impact of learned behaviour, and in fact suggests we try practicing the opposite of our control preference – just in case we’ve convinced ourselves to stick with a method that isn’t a cognitive match.

“Non-inverters should give inversion a try – and inverters should give non-inversion another shot,” Corbett argues. “You might even want to force yourself to stick with it for a few hours. People have learned one way. That doesn’t mean they won’t learn another way even better.

“A good example is being left-handed. Until the mid-20th century, left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand, causing some people to have lifelong handwriting difficulties and learning problems. Many older adults still don’t realise they’re naturally left-handed and could write/draw much better if they switched back.”

Sometimes, when I’m running a quick test of something on the Steam Deck, I leave the Y-axis uninverted just because I can’t be bothered to delve into the menus to change it. Does that count?

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You Like Your Controls Inverted Because Of Science–And Your Brain

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Study into inverted versus uninverted controls suggests we can stop having pointless arguments about it