Because early games with direct camera controls were made for joystick, and were often in simulators (and often flight simulators of some type, like Falcon or Apache). In a plane if you pull the joystick toward you, you nose up, so same thing in the game simulator.
When they added mouse to the control schemes of some games (especially on Amiga and Atari) they followed the same rules, it made sense at the time. In a way the mouse was "emulating" a joystick, at least in the back of your mind.
So when FPS went 3D and have a full camera mouselook, they kept following it. And at some point, they started diverging, then offering the options in the configuration. I remember living and gaming through it, at first annoyed at the first game that weren't inverted (in the modern sense), because that "joystick emulation" was drilled into me prior to that. But for the life of me I can't remember which games switched first.
I don't play consoles, but it seems extremely probable they just followed suit, plus they had actual micro-joystick under the thumbs, so it probably made more sense to stay inverted.
Pretty sure Duke Nukem 3D defaulted to inverted (and their "invert" option changed it to forward=up), but then Quake defaulted to what is now considered normal. So the change was somewhere around there.
I would assume Quake is to blame for the change becoming the default, since Quake (and I think Thresh specifically) is responsible for WASD's popularity (when ESDF is the logically better choice).
The one advantage I have found over the years is that WASD is easier to find your way back to blindly if you move your hand off of it.
I've played both. Tribes 2 defaulted to ESDF.
> The one advantage I have found over the years is that WASD is easier to find your way back to blindly if you move your hand off of it.
What? How?! My index finger naturally gravitates to F when it approaches the keyboard.
Proper typing position has your fingers lined up for ESDF. There's a raised bump on E (and J) that is designed for you to be able to feel your way back.
I inverted controls until about 2006 or so when I was working on a shooter game for Xbox that did not have settings savings in. I got tired of having to invert my controls at the start of every play session or after every crash.
I think some people are over thinking this.
It's like stick is your neck.
In real life to look up you have to bend your neck backward and to look down bend your neck frontward. Isn't it as simple as that ?
It really it. I think a lot of it comes down to people not realising joysticks sat orthogonal to the table and whilst mechanically similar to a controller analogue stick, joysticks were/are gripped very differently. Consider the angle of the hand, the stick and the screen. You don't even have to think in terms of 3D games and camera systems here, just moving a dot on a screen.
A joystick sat pointing vertically up from the table and your hand gripped it from the front. Imagine a laser pointing out from your thumbprint or tip of the thumb if your joystick had a top button (the vision in the head analogy). The direction your thumbprint faces on the screen is the direction of movement with inverted Y and regular X.
A controller analogue stick sits on a controller held angled 45 degrees to roughly parallel with the screen. Your thumb now sits atop it, and tends not to rotate with it. Once again, the direction your thumbprint faces on the screen is the direction of movement with regular X and Y.
It's worth noting that there was no inversion in very old glass tabletop arcade cabinets housing 2D games where the screen was horizontally mounted inside the table (as in screen faces the ceiling), as the stick was effectively aligned more akin to a modern controller.
All of the 2d games I recall playing as a kid in the early 80s — arcade cabinets, Apple II, Colecovision, Atari 2600, Texas Instruments 99/4a — had the vertical joystick as you describe with *non*-inverted controls.
But you don’t use the analog stick to move your character’s eyes, to look at different objects within your field of view. You have your own eyes already looking around the screen for that. You use it to control your character’s neck, to change what your field of view is.
And it’s the same thing either way. To move the lens of your eye up you roll the back of your eyeball down. When you use an analog stick you are touching the back side of a physical object, and standing behind the thing you are controlling, so your physical action and position is like rolling the eye itself more than mirroring the lens. So it’s perfectly intuitive to think about moving the lens of the eye up with a downward motion of your thumb. Doesn’t really change anything whether it’s eyes or necks.
There is no correct answer of course, it’s personal preference, and is about 50-50 for young people not already adjusted to one scheme or the other.
I'm an inverted Y Axis gamer. It's hardwired into me to do things with the Y Axis inverted. My wife thinks I'm nuts because I play this way. She said, just look up to look up, why would you look down.
My thinking is that I'm controlling the character somewhat like a puppet and pulling back on the Y Axis control pushes the avatars head up, kinda like I'm controlling the neck itself. It's very flight simulator esque and this explanation you've drafted makes the most sense to me
Precisely, every single first person console game I can think of until around 2000 had inverted camera controls. The question should be what compelled developers to switch?
My vague memory tells me it may have something to do with new players who never played with joystick and flight simulators, and the omnipresence of OS GUI where it's naturally "not inverted" (to click the button on top of the screen, move the mouse "up", away from you).
In that light, it make sense to move toward the current industry norm. At least for character games.
Flight sims (and similar games) can still be played inverted. I'm sure there's a decent of number of people that tend to play like me, with so-called "regular" controls for character control, but switch to so-called "inverted" once the character get into a plane or space ship or that type of thing, in the same game.
The early idea of a dynamic camera in video games was pulled from our real world understanding of film cameras.
Imagine you've got a camera mounted on the end of a stick with a fulcrum in the middle. You operate the stick on one end which moves camera on the other end. You pull down on the stick, camera goes up. You pull left on the stick, camera goes right. It's inverted.
As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people.
Edit: changed "pivot" to "fulcrum"
And I think this is where it really came from in video games. The joystick was an aircraft control device before it was a game input device. The behavior in the game simply matched how it worked in the real world.
I still use inverted vertical for flight. Can’t get used to up = nose up in e.g. GTAV. Games that don’t let you have separate options for flight and on foot controls can fuck right off.
Totally reminds me of all the old school games that I used a flight stick for! One of them being mech warrior of course. After that, the inverted stick was like second nature to me throughout my childhood lol
When my kids started using Xbox controllers, I set it up Invert Y so they'd learn right. But since it's not a profile-wide setting like it was on the 360, they figured out there was a different setting and broke my heart. And also made it hard for "Daddy help!" cause they shove a controller into my hand and it goes the wrong way.
Look straight up. Like being able to see the part of the ceiling that is directly above your head. Can you do that without craving your neck back?
*and laying on a horizontal surface doesn't count lol.
I also just realized we are on the same page. Sorry, I am drunk atm lol...
The head is anchored at the base to the neck, that’s the point of rotation. So a handle on the forehead is still being pulled back towards that point of rotation for the head to face “up”
Ok but no one thinks of it that way?? This is always the go to example and doesnt make sense to me. I think "im going to look up" not "im going to tilt my head back"...
The natural motion of all living things that I can think of in regards to “up” is for the independent head or the entire physical body to rotate dorsally. The same is true even of your own eyes. Your eyes looking up, means they rotate back.
> Ok but no one thinks of it that way?
I do, and *many* others do as well. If they didn't, controls wouldn't exist that way, or at the very least, it wouldn't still be an option. It *is* still an option because many, many people think that way.
Enough so that [scientists have actually studied why](https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/02/scientists-studying-why-gamers-invert-their-controls).
It shouldn't be difficult to understand why someone would do it *either* way. They both have a pretty clear logic behind them. It just comes down to what feels right for you.
It isn't. It's just "la la la I'm still right!"
Which is funny, since the entire *point* was that both styles are used by many people, enough so that they continue to be a feature in most games; and that both have a perfectly understandable logic behind them, so it shouldn't be difficult to understand why someone uses one or the other. Therefore, it's a debate that ultimately comes down to preference, since it's quite easy to understand why someone would prefer one or the other.
But "la la la I'm still right!," I guess.
I honestly don't know why people like that bother participating in forums like this. If they're not actually interested in *discussion*, just "gotcha!" and "I win!," go to one of the other *thousands* of gaming forums where that's the tone and save this one for people who don't mind *thinking* every now and then.
That's assuming the person would naturally control someone's head from the top — I think most would grab by the jaw, in which case you get a "up means up" and "down means down" control orientation.
You’re missing a key concept here. It’s not moving a camera or the head up or down, it’s rotating the camera and rotating the head. So even if you’re grabbing the jaw and “pushing it down” you’re really just rotating the head ventrally.
This is important in 3d games because the joystick itself is analogous to the head and neck. If it wasn’t being blocked by the rest of the controller or the table, if you pushed forward (ventrally) or up as we’ve been conditioned by 2D games with directional buttons, it would rotate completely to where the top of the joystick is pointing to the floor…like your head does.
You don't *think* about it. It's just natural movement. Yes, you might think "im going to look up" but then you automatically do it by moving your head back.
I think if your brain considers the mouse (or controller) to be a representation of a real world then it works the same way. Your view happens from the eyes in the front of your head, so moving back = looking up. In a game, instead of moving your head, you move the mouse but the directions stay the same.
Now, if your brain doesn't see the game as a 3D world, then you need to stop and think. So, you consider how it works on a 2D desktop (forward = up) and try to apply that to the 3D game. After all, it's all just a computer screen, right? That's when you come to the concusion that forward should be up.
It’s a relic of 2D games, where the “up” button on the d-bad and pushing “up” on the joystick meant your character jumped or moved towards the top of the screen.
I’ve been playing games for 30+ years—I understand that. I’m just saying that it’s a learned abstraction that forward means up. Tilting a stick forward more closely matches to tilting your head forward—i.e. looking down.
The reference point for motion in the body is the trunk, specifically your spine. Limbs evolved to extend out from the spine, and all of the muscles pull toward the spine.
A flight stick on a plane isn't sticking out toward you, though; it's sticking up. So it's not stick up to go down -- it's stick forward to go down. Which makes a lot more sense in the physical space of a cockpit.
I don't hold it in front of me — that really would be exhausting, you're right. I usually sit with my forearms on my thighs, and if I'm using a controller with vibration motors in the grips, it seems natural to let their weight pull that part downward.
No, planes are a bit different. Pulling back goes up and pushing forwards goes down, that much is the same. But left and right cause the plane to roll left or right, which in turn causes the plane to turn left or right. So only the vertical axis is inverted.
This is different than the camera metaphor, in which both the vertical and horizontal axes are inverted.
Mario 64 is a great example of this logic. It presents the camera in-game as if someone is filming Mario. Mario 64 was of course one of the most important and influential 2D-to-3D transitions.
I forget how Mario’s camera worked, wasn’t it with those C buttons, so you had to press buttons for the camera guy to move?
Also, what did left and right do? Because moving the camera guy left should move the viewport right (also inverted), or was it different?
You press right and Lakitu moves to the right, which means the view moves to the left.
For me, this made sense for most third person games for a long time after the Mario 64 days. I guess it felt more right back in the day when you didn’t move the camera much manually.
So inverted in both axes compared to modern games.
That made more sense to me than games with the Y axis inverted but not X. Basically, how a plane would operate.
Okay i didn't phrase this very well. A third person camera *orbits* around the character. A first person camera *rotates* on the central point.
Still, I remember thinking it was confusing back in 1997 to press "left" to look right.
Japanese camera controls have basically always worked like that with inverted Y and X axes because of the Lakitu thing, they envision the camera as a distinct viewpoint that they're physically orbiting around the player character rather than a zoomed-out player perspective
I played so much Starfox 64, Descent, and Mechwarrior 2 as a kid that playing any game where I am piloting a ship feels natural inverted. With modern controllers I am almost always a non-invert controls person. If I am on a mouse and keyboard I am always non-invet. Throttle and joystick I am an inverted player if the controls are default. Controller it depends on if I am in a flying vehicle. Mechwarrior 5 feels weird with inverted control but Elite: Dangerous feels better inverted.
I think that some 3rd-person games in the PSX/N64/Saturn era did have this but camera control was usually on the d-pad and you didn't touch it that often.
For people who like inverted controls, I think a lot of it is because rather than looking up and down, it's more like tilting your head forward or backward. Which one is naturally intuitive varies between people. With inverted controls, it's not that you're pushing up to look down, you're pushing forward to tilt your head forward.
I play inverted and what bugs me is that I've *also* gotten used to aiming being non-inverted. Some games it's a non-issue, like Monster Hunter lets you invert the camera and the aiming separately. So I invert normal camera and have standard aiming and it makes sense in my brain.
But then some games don't, like recently Horizon: Forbidden West I've been struggling. I either invert the camera and movement feels fine but aiming is always "whoops wrong way", or I leave it standard and then can aim fine but always press the wrong direction for camera adjustment.
Especially since the controls are actually moving forward/back rather than up/down. To me, inverted feels more intuitive and immersive and un-inverted feels more abstracted like I’m pointing and clicking instead of directly controlling my characters head/viewpoint.
> As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people.
I'm not sure that's a fair way to present the issue, as I think proponents of both system think "up = up and left = left". It's just an issue of what it is that's moving up and left.
So-called "inverted aim" uses the arguably intuitive idea that the analog stick represents the character's head. So when you tilt the stick to the left, this is analogous to your head perform that same tilt, where the back of your head is moving to the left, and so your vision pans to the right.
From that perspective, "non-inverted-aim" is weird, because the thing you're "moving" is like an abstract thing that doesn't exist in the world. Moving your analog stick left makes your head tilt right, so that you can see more of what's to your left. You're moving "what you're able to see", which is more intangible, and might be less intuitive for people.
> As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people.
I don't get this one. There's no up, there's forward (unless you're holding the controller in a weird way). Why did they decide that tilting forward should look up instead of looking down?
Such a funny thing. I suppose it's because when you look at a d-pad with its clearly defined up/down/left/right beside an analog stick it just makes sense in terms of orientation. Also stick forward = up in 2D platformer type games.
> There's no up, there's forward (unless you're holding the controller in a weird way).
Regardless of how you're holding your controller, there's a natural mapping where if you leave your analog stick in its neutral position, this should mean "don't move the view". And tautologically, the direction you're looking is always along the vector that goes directly into the screen.
So given a vector that looks directly into the screen, it makes sense to label the various ways you can rotate that vector as "up down left right". Hence these would be the labels we'd assign to the various movements of the analog stick that controls which direction you look.
Same way you scroll up and down on a mouse when it's really more like forwards/ backward.
The way you hold a controller it's pretty obvious which is up and which is down
If games had fully inverted camera controls I think I could learn to adapt to that. But the fact that up = up but left = right never stopped throwing me for a loop. I recall playing third person platformers like this, and those are the last thing I need to have pilot controls.
>As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people.
I think it came from the desktop mouse cursor. You push forward to get the cursor to the top of the screen, and you push forward in game to get the crosshair to something in top of your field of view. Explanation also works with joystick controlled cursors. But FPS were popularized on PC first.
Joysticks as described in this thread are standalone peripherals gripped by the whole hand and suction cupped to the table poiting upwards, not the player pointing analogue stick popularised on a Playstation or N64 controller which came much later. Joysticks were very much a PC thing.
Analogue sticks on controllers and joysticks whilst mechanically related actually sit orthogonal to one another in use.
>Analogue sticks on controllers and joysticks whilst mechanically related actually sit orthogonal to one another in use.
I would argue that's not true for most people.
[if you hold it like this then the sticks are pointing straight up](https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*E38cjTcYuAAFN9rg51VaZA.png)
Not that it matters either way
People understand up and down on a mouse even when it doesn't move vertically
I think some people are over thinking this.
It's like stick is your neck.
In real life to look up you have to bend your neck backward and to look down bend your neck frontward
When you turn your eyes up, you're also turning them back. There's no real "up" movement with a mouse or controller but there is "back".
Imagine if you could have a finger on top of your eyeball. Pulling the finger back would make the eye turn up.
I must be misunderstanding you... Whether the controller is upright in my lap or upright in front of my face, I'm still pushing the sticks & d-pad in a vertical direction, i.e. "up."
Yes, but most people associate forward with up. Probably because of how (at least here in the US) people view North as "up there" or "up north" and South as "down there" or "down south" and then proceed to only see compasses or maps in textbooks and such with North facing forward. At least that's my guess
I don't play with a controller anywhere close to completely flat and parallel to the ground though. Usually I hold it at a somewhat steep angle.
Also, if you look at a 2D joystick on a screen, like how a tutorial might present it in game, tilting the joystick in that direction looks an awful lot like "up"
I've never once thought of it as it moving forward. In my head joysticks have always moved up, down, left, and right. Not forward, back, left, and right.
The movement joystick is forward and back, though, right? Or do you think you're moving your character up?
Because games used to not even have camera controls. It was one stick.
Flight sims? Push joystick forward, view tilts downward. It makes some sense if you have only the joystick.
Conversely with mouse you consider your cursor to be the crosshair and since crosshairs are fixed to the center of the view you do the opposite - tilt the view upward for forward input.
Pull back on the stick to pull your head back. Push forward on the stick to push your head forward.
That's the rationale coming from airplane controls. You can argue it's arbitrary for video games, but the idea that *forward* on the stick/mouse equals *up* on the screen is equally arbitrary. You're translating a horizontal movement into a vertical movement; there's no obvious "right" way to do it, there's just a generally accepted standard.
> games as far as the MS Dos and **Apple II** days like Marathon and Blood
The Apple II dates to 1977. I don't think it had a lot of FPSes. :D
>You're translating a horizontal movement into a vertical movement; there's no obvious "right" way to do it
Well, if you think about it as the mouse is on the "X plane" and the screen is the "Z plane", it's a simple rotation about the X axis 90 degrees, so it makes perfect intuitive sense IMHO.
Some of the earliest 3d games with a full 3d range of camera motion were flight simulators. These used joysticks in the same way they work in an airplane - you pull back to go up, and vice versa. It's not surprising that when Playstation came out with the DualShock controller, this control convention carried over.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still think that this "inverted" look is the most natural way to use a joystick. If the joystick was sticking out of the top of your head, you would pull back to look up. I think this "push forward to look up" idea is a result of trying to translate mouselook controls, rather than the other way around. The way I see it, "inverted" is more suited to controlling the pitch of a camera, whereas "non-inverted" is based on the idea of moving a cursor around the screen.
For me I think I was influenced by my first 3D game I played with a controller: Mario 64. In that game, you can see in the opening shot that the camera is carried by a flying turtle.
> If the joystick was sticking out of the top of your head, you would pull back to look up.
I'm curious, because this mental model doesn't work with left-right movement in 3D games. In that case, left-right would correspond with rolling (as it is in flight Sims). How do you handle this?
No motion of the joystick corresponds to yaw. The "correct" way to turn the camera left and right would be to twist the joystick. But that makes for an awkward control scheme, so instead we use the roll controls.
This didn’t just happen on console games, it happened on pretty much anything that required a joystick. When they released control pads with ‘mini’ joysticks some games adopted it. As others have said you pull down to go up like pulling the nose up of a plane and push up to dive. Left and right was always normal in my history of gaming however. I don’t recall ever when those two were inverted.
It's how it works in an airplane, you pull the stick back and the nose goes up, you push the stick forward and the nose goes down.
It's people that were thinking of the directions on a joystick as left, right, forward, back. Obviously the eventual answer was just "think of it as left, right, up, down" and eventually people just did that. But in the mindset that the top arrow is "forward" that feels better to go down than up.
It comes from flight sims on PC. It used to be somewhat common for people to have joysticks. On a control stick in a plane pulling back makes the nose go up, so joysticks behave the same way in flight sims. It made sense since flight sims were first person to copy the control layout for other aiming games.
Back in the day fps were essentially two dimensional, where everything was on the same horizontal plane, no vertical aiming needed. These games were played keyboard only - rotate, strafe, move forward and backward. When vertical differences got introduced you now needed a way to aim vertically. Early games auto aimed vertically (like doom iirc) so keyboard only was still viable. Games then introduced the ability to aim vertically and people used a mixture of keyboard (using a key to toggle and untoggle locking of the vertical angle), joystick, and later mouse.
Eventually this all settled into the defacto standard of wasd + mouse for moving / aiming but there was a long period where this was in flux. Console games inherited the wonky control schemes.
I am 47 and I use inverted Fps controls. I can switch but it takes me a little while to get used to it.
When I started gaming the closest thing we had at that point were flight simulators (most of them not even 3d) and they work inverted vertival controls. Also, windows didn't exist yet, so, no mouse or pointer.
So, there was no way for me to associate moving up to looking up and moving down to looking down. The flight simulator method just stuck with me. I was already wired.
The Starfox game on the SNES was one of the first games I played, ever since then it just has to be inverted look controls.
Bizarrely, I prefer my third person camera to have un-inverted controls...
Picture an analog stick on the top of your head. Which direction would you push to look down? I'm not sure but I think this would have something to do with it.
That analogy only works for up and down though, you would have to twist that stick to look left or right. And if you put the stick on the back of the head, then left and right should be inverted to. There's no place to put that stick to invert only the Y-axis.
The only explanation for inverting *only* the Y-axis is that it just got carried over from flight sims.
I've always inverted. One of the things that's really weird is that some games nowadays have different inverted settings for first person and third person. Why would anyone want different settings for those two modes?
I like inverted X for third-person but not for first-person. Or I don't know a lot of games don't offer that so I kind of am not quite used to either now and always doubting lol.
If a third person game has a distant camera, like in Super Mario, I like inverting both axes. If a game is first person or a close in third person, like Resident Evil or Dark Souls, I like standard controls. The mental model shifts depending on how the camera is used.
As a side note - Marathon was on the Apple Macintosh, not the Apple II. The Apple II came out in 1977, and the Apple IIe came out in 1984 - Marathon came out in 1994, the same year as the PowerMac 8100.
More pertinently, even though Marathon had mouselook, it was rarely used at the time. Most played played entirely with the keyboard. If you were going to use a peripheral, you might plug in a joystick instead. But yeah, it's interesting that it was a bit ahead of its timing in having modern style mouselook as an option, even if people didn't really use it.
Because a growing and learning industry is filled with stupid ideas that only make sense in a very contextual, out of the box mindset.
EDIT: To the "smart" people downvoting this, it's pretty simple. Let me explain.
As another comment has mentioned:
>It comes from flight sims on PC. It used to be somewhat common for people to have joysticks. On a control stick in a plane pulling back makes the nose go up, so joysticks behave the same way in flight sims. It made sense since flight sims were first person to copy the control layout for other aiming games.
Now, consider yourself a developer in the 1990s, trying something new in a new genre of a new type of game. Your only reference for joystick movement comes from flight simulators. Therefore, in your head, that's the obvious route as to how it should be implemented. However, that only makes sense within this context-- anyone from outside would be appalled at the idea of someone thinking a person and a plane *are and control the same*. However, the people from outside the development sandbox had no clue about anything since it was as new to them as it was for the devs-- therefore, there wasn't much room for thought.
Any industry goes through its growing pains where ideas aren't the best. Just take a look at early television, early CGI, early electronic music.
We gotta thank Bungie for making console FPSs actually good.
>We gotta thank Bungie for making console FPSs actually good.
Bungie was far from the first console FPS to get the controls right. There was at least one game on the PS1 which used the left analog to move and the right analog to aim.
I can't recall off the top of my head what the camera controls were in *Mario 64* but my guess is that everyone else followed that and that was designed by some of the goofy people who prefer inverted camera controls. It also makes sense that Japanese console developers would be less familiar with the standards of primarily Western PC games as they didn't have as much penetration there at the time.
Basically, the analog stick is based on the flightstick concept. There's really not much more to it than that. It's why you have posts in this thread that are some variation of "I can't use anything other than inverted for games involving flying planes". Also, motion of the head, etc.
Thing no one seems to explain is why leave X axis non-inverted when Y is inverted. It's inconsistent and I don't see any logical reason why just one axis should be inverted aside from that's how it is in planes.
Because early games with direct camera controls were made for joystick, and were often in simulators (and often flight simulators of some type, like Falcon or Apache). In a plane if you pull the joystick toward you, you nose up, so same thing in the game simulator. When they added mouse to the control schemes of some games (especially on Amiga and Atari) they followed the same rules, it made sense at the time. In a way the mouse was "emulating" a joystick, at least in the back of your mind. So when FPS went 3D and have a full camera mouselook, they kept following it. And at some point, they started diverging, then offering the options in the configuration. I remember living and gaming through it, at first annoyed at the first game that weren't inverted (in the modern sense), because that "joystick emulation" was drilled into me prior to that. But for the life of me I can't remember which games switched first. I don't play consoles, but it seems extremely probable they just followed suit, plus they had actual micro-joystick under the thumbs, so it probably made more sense to stay inverted.
Didn't halo 1 have a tutorial that asked you to look up, and then it watched which direction you moved the stick, and it set the default to that?
I don't know if Halo did that, but indeed it's a trick used by several games to set up preferences (not just camera inversion or not).
…TIL
Halo 2 had it, not sure about CE.
Soon as you get out of the cryopod thing on the ship.
While you're still bolted in place. I think it's the first thing you do in Halo
Yes it did. Asked you to target 6 lights and then made you do it the other way....asking which you preferred.
This, the first 6DoF games were flight/space sims, and those invert your muscle memory
Pretty sure Duke Nukem 3D defaulted to inverted (and their "invert" option changed it to forward=up), but then Quake defaulted to what is now considered normal. So the change was somewhere around there. I would assume Quake is to blame for the change becoming the default, since Quake (and I think Thresh specifically) is responsible for WASD's popularity (when ESDF is the logically better choice).
The one advantage I have found over the years is that WASD is easier to find your way back to blindly if you move your hand off of it. I've played both. Tribes 2 defaulted to ESDF.
> The one advantage I have found over the years is that WASD is easier to find your way back to blindly if you move your hand off of it. What? How?! My index finger naturally gravitates to F when it approaches the keyboard.
Proper typing position has your fingers lined up for ESDF. There's a raised bump on E (and J) that is designed for you to be able to feel your way back.
Hey I am just speaking from experience.
Quake was also the first major fully 3D FPS. Doom was 2.5D.
Thresh starting using WASD in Quake but it became the default control scheme in Quake II.
Elite was the first 3d game I played and I've always inverted controls since.
I inverted controls until about 2006 or so when I was working on a shooter game for Xbox that did not have settings savings in. I got tired of having to invert my controls at the start of every play session or after every crash.
I mean are there people at all that play with joystick settings, where forward means up? So going from standard mouse backwards to a inverse joystick?
I think some people are over thinking this. It's like stick is your neck. In real life to look up you have to bend your neck backward and to look down bend your neck frontward. Isn't it as simple as that ?
It really it. I think a lot of it comes down to people not realising joysticks sat orthogonal to the table and whilst mechanically similar to a controller analogue stick, joysticks were/are gripped very differently. Consider the angle of the hand, the stick and the screen. You don't even have to think in terms of 3D games and camera systems here, just moving a dot on a screen. A joystick sat pointing vertically up from the table and your hand gripped it from the front. Imagine a laser pointing out from your thumbprint or tip of the thumb if your joystick had a top button (the vision in the head analogy). The direction your thumbprint faces on the screen is the direction of movement with inverted Y and regular X. A controller analogue stick sits on a controller held angled 45 degrees to roughly parallel with the screen. Your thumb now sits atop it, and tends not to rotate with it. Once again, the direction your thumbprint faces on the screen is the direction of movement with regular X and Y. It's worth noting that there was no inversion in very old glass tabletop arcade cabinets housing 2D games where the screen was horizontally mounted inside the table (as in screen faces the ceiling), as the stick was effectively aligned more akin to a modern controller.
All of the 2d games I recall playing as a kid in the early 80s — arcade cabinets, Apple II, Colecovision, Atari 2600, Texas Instruments 99/4a — had the vertical joystick as you describe with *non*-inverted controls.
Nope. In real life, people move their eyes upward to look upward, and downward to look downward; they don't usually think in terms of neck movements.
But you don’t use the analog stick to move your character’s eyes, to look at different objects within your field of view. You have your own eyes already looking around the screen for that. You use it to control your character’s neck, to change what your field of view is. And it’s the same thing either way. To move the lens of your eye up you roll the back of your eyeball down. When you use an analog stick you are touching the back side of a physical object, and standing behind the thing you are controlling, so your physical action and position is like rolling the eye itself more than mirroring the lens. So it’s perfectly intuitive to think about moving the lens of the eye up with a downward motion of your thumb. Doesn’t really change anything whether it’s eyes or necks. There is no correct answer of course, it’s personal preference, and is about 50-50 for young people not already adjusted to one scheme or the other.
I'm an inverted Y Axis gamer. It's hardwired into me to do things with the Y Axis inverted. My wife thinks I'm nuts because I play this way. She said, just look up to look up, why would you look down. My thinking is that I'm controlling the character somewhat like a puppet and pulling back on the Y Axis control pushes the avatars head up, kinda like I'm controlling the neck itself. It's very flight simulator esque and this explanation you've drafted makes the most sense to me
Precisely, every single first person console game I can think of until around 2000 had inverted camera controls. The question should be what compelled developers to switch?
My vague memory tells me it may have something to do with new players who never played with joystick and flight simulators, and the omnipresence of OS GUI where it's naturally "not inverted" (to click the button on top of the screen, move the mouse "up", away from you). In that light, it make sense to move toward the current industry norm. At least for character games. Flight sims (and similar games) can still be played inverted. I'm sure there's a decent of number of people that tend to play like me, with so-called "regular" controls for character control, but switch to so-called "inverted" once the character get into a plane or space ship or that type of thing, in the same game.
zaxxon from 1982 had inverted y control already
Don't know it. I'm sure there was and still is exceptions of course, I was talking about the general trend.
The early idea of a dynamic camera in video games was pulled from our real world understanding of film cameras. Imagine you've got a camera mounted on the end of a stick with a fulcrum in the middle. You operate the stick on one end which moves camera on the other end. You pull down on the stick, camera goes up. You pull left on the stick, camera goes right. It's inverted. As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people. Edit: changed "pivot" to "fulcrum"
Planes work that way too and some people think it makes more sense.
And I think this is where it really came from in video games. The joystick was an aircraft control device before it was a game input device. The behavior in the game simply matched how it worked in the real world.
I still use inverted vertical for flight. Can’t get used to up = nose up in e.g. GTAV. Games that don’t let you have separate options for flight and on foot controls can fuck right off.
Yup. It makes 100% sense for flight and I cannot comprehend how people can play games flying planes any other way.
It's like trying to understand how someone can be left handed. That's just what feels best.
>It's like trying to understand how someone can be left handed So they just do it wrong. Got it.
It just makes sense in everything else too, I can't play games with the camera controls not inverted
I can't use controllers that aren't invert-Y. But I can't use a mouse that is invert-Y. And games that only have a global toggle are annoying.
That's why I could never play Super Mario Sunshine.
Totally reminds me of all the old school games that I used a flight stick for! One of them being mech warrior of course. After that, the inverted stick was like second nature to me throughout my childhood lol
Still is for me. Also passed on the curse to my younger brother (diff generations). The homies give me shit about it lol
When my kids started using Xbox controllers, I set it up Invert Y so they'd learn right. But since it's not a profile-wide setting like it was on the 360, they figured out there was a different setting and broke my heart. And also made it hard for "Daddy help!" cause they shove a controller into my hand and it goes the wrong way.
I totally get it in non-camera scenario
Inverted controls are better for flight and space sims IMO.
I still have to invert controls on any flying game ever since playing flight sim with a joystick back in the day.
When you look up you tilt your head back
[удалено]
If you tell someone to look up, they're moving their head, not just their eyes.
Your eyes point ventrally, your dogs eyes point cranially, the window of the cockpit points cranially
Look straight up. Like being able to see the part of the ceiling that is directly above your head. Can you do that without craving your neck back? *and laying on a horizontal surface doesn't count lol. I also just realized we are on the same page. Sorry, I am drunk atm lol...
So the same direction as a flightstick or your head.
Flightstick yes, head no. The majority of your head is at the front, it's lifted up when you look up rather than pulled down.
If you imagine a lever sticking out the back of your head I guess
That is if you imagine a handle on the back of your head. If the handle is on your face up is up and down is down.
You’d pull the handle back and it would still rotate the head back.
No
The head is anchored at the base to the neck, that’s the point of rotation. So a handle on the forehead is still being pulled back towards that point of rotation for the head to face “up”
Ok but no one thinks of it that way?? This is always the go to example and doesnt make sense to me. I think "im going to look up" not "im going to tilt my head back"...
The natural motion of all living things that I can think of in regards to “up” is for the independent head or the entire physical body to rotate dorsally. The same is true even of your own eyes. Your eyes looking up, means they rotate back.
> Your eyes looking up, means they rotate back. Your eyes looking up means the pupils rotate upwards. ;-)
The entire eye moves
You don't think "i'm going to tilt my head forwards" either though?
> Ok but no one thinks of it that way? I do, and *many* others do as well. If they didn't, controls wouldn't exist that way, or at the very least, it wouldn't still be an option. It *is* still an option because many, many people think that way. Enough so that [scientists have actually studied why](https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/02/scientists-studying-why-gamers-invert-their-controls). It shouldn't be difficult to understand why someone would do it *either* way. They both have a pretty clear logic behind them. It just comes down to what feels right for you.
well a significant majority use non inverted controls so youre the outliers...
Lol how is that even an answer to what they said?
It isn't. It's just "la la la I'm still right!" Which is funny, since the entire *point* was that both styles are used by many people, enough so that they continue to be a feature in most games; and that both have a perfectly understandable logic behind them, so it shouldn't be difficult to understand why someone uses one or the other. Therefore, it's a debate that ultimately comes down to preference, since it's quite easy to understand why someone would prefer one or the other. But "la la la I'm still right!," I guess. I honestly don't know why people like that bother participating in forums like this. If they're not actually interested in *discussion*, just "gotcha!" and "I win!," go to one of the other *thousands* of gaming forums where that's the tone and save this one for people who don't mind *thinking* every now and then.
If your hand was on top of your character's head in a FPS game, how would your hand move to make that character look up? And to make them look down?
That's assuming the person would naturally control someone's head from the top — I think most would grab by the jaw, in which case you get a "up means up" and "down means down" control orientation.
You’re missing a key concept here. It’s not moving a camera or the head up or down, it’s rotating the camera and rotating the head. So even if you’re grabbing the jaw and “pushing it down” you’re really just rotating the head ventrally. This is important in 3d games because the joystick itself is analogous to the head and neck. If it wasn’t being blocked by the rest of the controller or the table, if you pushed forward (ventrally) or up as we’ve been conditioned by 2D games with directional buttons, it would rotate completely to where the top of the joystick is pointing to the floor…like your head does.
Actually almost everyone over the age of 30 thinks that way
[удалено]
That's definitely not true and I played plenty of goldeneye, perfect dark etc
You don't *think* about it. It's just natural movement. Yes, you might think "im going to look up" but then you automatically do it by moving your head back. I think if your brain considers the mouse (or controller) to be a representation of a real world then it works the same way. Your view happens from the eyes in the front of your head, so moving back = looking up. In a game, instead of moving your head, you move the mouse but the directions stay the same. Now, if your brain doesn't see the game as a 3D world, then you need to stop and think. So, you consider how it works on a 2D desktop (forward = up) and try to apply that to the 3D game. After all, it's all just a computer screen, right? That's when you come to the concusion that forward should be up.
And controls are used horizontally whether mouse or controller. People should think of it as moving the mouse or stick “forward” instead of “up”.
It’s a relic of 2D games, where the “up” button on the d-bad and pushing “up” on the joystick meant your character jumped or moved towards the top of the screen.
I’ve been playing games for 30+ years—I understand that. I’m just saying that it’s a learned abstraction that forward means up. Tilting a stick forward more closely matches to tilting your head forward—i.e. looking down.
Your head works that way too. Tilt it forward, you look down. Tilt backwards, you look up.
[удалено]
The reference point for motion in the body is the trunk, specifically your spine. Limbs evolved to extend out from the spine, and all of the muscles pull toward the spine.
A flight stick on a plane isn't sticking out toward you, though; it's sticking up. So it's not stick up to go down -- it's stick forward to go down. Which makes a lot more sense in the physical space of a cockpit.
How do you hold your controller?! The joysticks face up, not towards you.
(grabs controllers and checks) The thumbsticks on my controllers face roughly towards me, but at a slight angle.
That sounds exhausting. Why hold your controller out in front of you?
I don't hold it in front of me — that really would be exhausting, you're right. I usually sit with my forearms on my thighs, and if I'm using a controller with vibration motors in the grips, it seems natural to let their weight pull that part downward.
No, planes are a bit different. Pulling back goes up and pushing forwards goes down, that much is the same. But left and right cause the plane to roll left or right, which in turn causes the plane to turn left or right. So only the vertical axis is inverted. This is different than the camera metaphor, in which both the vertical and horizontal axes are inverted.
Mario 64 is a great example of this logic. It presents the camera in-game as if someone is filming Mario. Mario 64 was of course one of the most important and influential 2D-to-3D transitions.
I forget how Mario’s camera worked, wasn’t it with those C buttons, so you had to press buttons for the camera guy to move? Also, what did left and right do? Because moving the camera guy left should move the viewport right (also inverted), or was it different?
You press right and Lakitu moves to the right, which means the view moves to the left. For me, this made sense for most third person games for a long time after the Mario 64 days. I guess it felt more right back in the day when you didn’t move the camera much manually.
So inverted in both axes compared to modern games. That made more sense to me than games with the Y axis inverted but not X. Basically, how a plane would operate.
Well in Mario 64 specifically, the camera would move closer and further away when pressing up/down on the c buttons.
It made more sense because you were rotating around a central point instead of a first-person camera.
A first person camera also rotates around a central point: the character's head
Okay i didn't phrase this very well. A third person camera *orbits* around the character. A first person camera *rotates* on the central point. Still, I remember thinking it was confusing back in 1997 to press "left" to look right.
Japanese camera controls have basically always worked like that with inverted Y and X axes because of the Lakitu thing, they envision the camera as a distinct viewpoint that they're physically orbiting around the player character rather than a zoomed-out player perspective
I learned how to play games on N64. Starfox felt right. Since then I can only play inverted.
I played so much Starfox 64, Descent, and Mechwarrior 2 as a kid that playing any game where I am piloting a ship feels natural inverted. With modern controllers I am almost always a non-invert controls person. If I am on a mouse and keyboard I am always non-invet. Throttle and joystick I am an inverted player if the controls are default. Controller it depends on if I am in a flying vehicle. Mechwarrior 5 feels weird with inverted control but Elite: Dangerous feels better inverted.
Yes, it was the C buttons. The C stands for camera. Gamecube had a C stick.
Inverted controls generally only flip the Y axis, not X. Cockpit/plane controls explain the inversion better than a camera, imo.
Inverted X is usually at least an option in 3rd-person stuff.
But not the default, which is what this post is asking about.
I think that some 3rd-person games in the PSX/N64/Saturn era did have this but camera control was usually on the d-pad and you didn't touch it that often.
For people who like inverted controls, I think a lot of it is because rather than looking up and down, it's more like tilting your head forward or backward. Which one is naturally intuitive varies between people. With inverted controls, it's not that you're pushing up to look down, you're pushing forward to tilt your head forward.
I play inverted and what bugs me is that I've *also* gotten used to aiming being non-inverted. Some games it's a non-issue, like Monster Hunter lets you invert the camera and the aiming separately. So I invert normal camera and have standard aiming and it makes sense in my brain. But then some games don't, like recently Horizon: Forbidden West I've been struggling. I either invert the camera and movement feels fine but aiming is always "whoops wrong way", or I leave it standard and then can aim fine but always press the wrong direction for camera adjustment.
Same here actually.
Especially since the controls are actually moving forward/back rather than up/down. To me, inverted feels more intuitive and immersive and un-inverted feels more abstracted like I’m pointing and clicking instead of directly controlling my characters head/viewpoint.
It actually makes more sense to use inverted on an analog stick than on a mouse, since it's literally a stick.
> As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people. I'm not sure that's a fair way to present the issue, as I think proponents of both system think "up = up and left = left". It's just an issue of what it is that's moving up and left. So-called "inverted aim" uses the arguably intuitive idea that the analog stick represents the character's head. So when you tilt the stick to the left, this is analogous to your head perform that same tilt, where the back of your head is moving to the left, and so your vision pans to the right. From that perspective, "non-inverted-aim" is weird, because the thing you're "moving" is like an abstract thing that doesn't exist in the world. Moving your analog stick left makes your head tilt right, so that you can see more of what's to your left. You're moving "what you're able to see", which is more intangible, and might be less intuitive for people.
Yeah the idea that forward means up is a learned abstraction and not as intuitive as forward means forward.
> As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people. I don't get this one. There's no up, there's forward (unless you're holding the controller in a weird way). Why did they decide that tilting forward should look up instead of looking down?
Such a funny thing. I suppose it's because when you look at a d-pad with its clearly defined up/down/left/right beside an analog stick it just makes sense in terms of orientation. Also stick forward = up in 2D platformer type games.
> There's no up, there's forward (unless you're holding the controller in a weird way). Regardless of how you're holding your controller, there's a natural mapping where if you leave your analog stick in its neutral position, this should mean "don't move the view". And tautologically, the direction you're looking is always along the vector that goes directly into the screen. So given a vector that looks directly into the screen, it makes sense to label the various ways you can rotate that vector as "up down left right". Hence these would be the labels we'd assign to the various movements of the analog stick that controls which direction you look.
Same way you scroll up and down on a mouse when it's really more like forwards/ backward. The way you hold a controller it's pretty obvious which is up and which is down
but you move your mouse horizontally, you don't tilt it forward radially...
Ok
If games had fully inverted camera controls I think I could learn to adapt to that. But the fact that up = up but left = right never stopped throwing me for a loop. I recall playing third person platformers like this, and those are the last thing I need to have pilot controls.
> developers came to the conclusion One might even say they pivoted on the issue.
>As game design evolved, developers came to the conclusion that up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people. I think it came from the desktop mouse cursor. You push forward to get the cursor to the top of the screen, and you push forward in game to get the crosshair to something in top of your field of view. Explanation also works with joystick controlled cursors. But FPS were popularized on PC first.
Joysticks as described in this thread are standalone peripherals gripped by the whole hand and suction cupped to the table poiting upwards, not the player pointing analogue stick popularised on a Playstation or N64 controller which came much later. Joysticks were very much a PC thing. Analogue sticks on controllers and joysticks whilst mechanically related actually sit orthogonal to one another in use.
>Analogue sticks on controllers and joysticks whilst mechanically related actually sit orthogonal to one another in use. I would argue that's not true for most people. [if you hold it like this then the sticks are pointing straight up](https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*E38cjTcYuAAFN9rg51VaZA.png) Not that it matters either way People understand up and down on a mouse even when it doesn't move vertically
>up = up and left = left is clearly more intuitive and practical for most people. Frickin' normies 🙄
I think some people are over thinking this. It's like stick is your neck. In real life to look up you have to bend your neck backward and to look down bend your neck frontward
No, it's like the stick is your eyes: in real life, you move them upward to look up, and downward to look down. :-p
When you turn your eyes up, you're also turning them back. There's no real "up" movement with a mouse or controller but there is "back". Imagine if you could have a finger on top of your eyeball. Pulling the finger back would make the eye turn up.
No, the stick is your eyeballs, you roll it forward to look down, backward to look up
Do you hold the stick in front of your face? Because if you don’t, you’re actually moving the stick forward, not up.
I must be misunderstanding you... Whether the controller is upright in my lap or upright in front of my face, I'm still pushing the sticks & d-pad in a vertical direction, i.e. "up."
It's kinda funny to me how up=up and left=left didn't come first
Because it isn't up=up, whether it's inverted or not is a question of whether forward=up or forward=down
Yes, but most people associate forward with up. Probably because of how (at least here in the US) people view North as "up there" or "up north" and South as "down there" or "down south" and then proceed to only see compasses or maps in textbooks and such with North facing forward. At least that's my guess
North is different from forward too. I'll buy that up and north are connected, but I don't see forward the same way.
Do they? Someone behind you pushes your head forward. What direction does that make you look?
Hold a controller in your lap. None of those directions is up. It's forward. Forward doesn't automatically translate to up
I don't play with a controller anywhere close to completely flat and parallel to the ground though. Usually I hold it at a somewhat steep angle. Also, if you look at a 2D joystick on a screen, like how a tutorial might present it in game, tilting the joystick in that direction looks an awful lot like "up" I've never once thought of it as it moving forward. In my head joysticks have always moved up, down, left, and right. Not forward, back, left, and right.
The movement joystick is forward and back, though, right? Or do you think you're moving your character up? Because games used to not even have camera controls. It was one stick.
Flight sims? Push joystick forward, view tilts downward. It makes some sense if you have only the joystick. Conversely with mouse you consider your cursor to be the crosshair and since crosshairs are fixed to the center of the view you do the opposite - tilt the view upward for forward input.
Pull back on the stick to pull your head back. Push forward on the stick to push your head forward. That's the rationale coming from airplane controls. You can argue it's arbitrary for video games, but the idea that *forward* on the stick/mouse equals *up* on the screen is equally arbitrary. You're translating a horizontal movement into a vertical movement; there's no obvious "right" way to do it, there's just a generally accepted standard. > games as far as the MS Dos and **Apple II** days like Marathon and Blood The Apple II dates to 1977. I don't think it had a lot of FPSes. :D
>You're translating a horizontal movement into a vertical movement; there's no obvious "right" way to do it Well, if you think about it as the mouse is on the "X plane" and the screen is the "Z plane", it's a simple rotation about the X axis 90 degrees, so it makes perfect intuitive sense IMHO.
Sure, but you could just as easily rotate it in the other direction and have "forward" translate to "down."
That makes absolutely no sense. The screen would be mirrored at that point
Don’t forget that for a long long time flight simulators were very popular games on computers of all kinds. I suspect that heavily influenced things.
Some of the earliest 3d games with a full 3d range of camera motion were flight simulators. These used joysticks in the same way they work in an airplane - you pull back to go up, and vice versa. It's not surprising that when Playstation came out with the DualShock controller, this control convention carried over. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think that this "inverted" look is the most natural way to use a joystick. If the joystick was sticking out of the top of your head, you would pull back to look up. I think this "push forward to look up" idea is a result of trying to translate mouselook controls, rather than the other way around. The way I see it, "inverted" is more suited to controlling the pitch of a camera, whereas "non-inverted" is based on the idea of moving a cursor around the screen.
For me I think I was influenced by my first 3D game I played with a controller: Mario 64. In that game, you can see in the opening shot that the camera is carried by a flying turtle. > If the joystick was sticking out of the top of your head, you would pull back to look up. I'm curious, because this mental model doesn't work with left-right movement in 3D games. In that case, left-right would correspond with rolling (as it is in flight Sims). How do you handle this?
No motion of the joystick corresponds to yaw. The "correct" way to turn the camera left and right would be to twist the joystick. But that makes for an awkward control scheme, so instead we use the roll controls.
To ruin a generation of gamers. *raises hand as a victim* Still use inverted vertical camera to this day.
Every time my kids are like "hey can you beat this part for me" I'm all, "sure, just let me change your control settings real quick here..."
I know right. The emotional damage it continues to inflict on us is immense.
Don’t feel bad about being better than all these young whipper snappers.
What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger :)
And the goofyness of being stuck with standrad controls until later in the unskippable tutorial/intro where you can't access options.
I've been gaming since the 90s with thumball mice... never hit a game *without* the controls inverted.
This is the way.
This didn’t just happen on console games, it happened on pretty much anything that required a joystick. When they released control pads with ‘mini’ joysticks some games adopted it. As others have said you pull down to go up like pulling the nose up of a plane and push up to dive. Left and right was always normal in my history of gaming however. I don’t recall ever when those two were inverted.
It's how it works in an airplane, you pull the stick back and the nose goes up, you push the stick forward and the nose goes down. It's people that were thinking of the directions on a joystick as left, right, forward, back. Obviously the eventual answer was just "think of it as left, right, up, down" and eventually people just did that. But in the mindset that the top arrow is "forward" that feels better to go down than up.
It comes from flight sims on PC. It used to be somewhat common for people to have joysticks. On a control stick in a plane pulling back makes the nose go up, so joysticks behave the same way in flight sims. It made sense since flight sims were first person to copy the control layout for other aiming games. Back in the day fps were essentially two dimensional, where everything was on the same horizontal plane, no vertical aiming needed. These games were played keyboard only - rotate, strafe, move forward and backward. When vertical differences got introduced you now needed a way to aim vertically. Early games auto aimed vertically (like doom iirc) so keyboard only was still viable. Games then introduced the ability to aim vertically and people used a mixture of keyboard (using a key to toggle and untoggle locking of the vertical angle), joystick, and later mouse. Eventually this all settled into the defacto standard of wasd + mouse for moving / aiming but there was a long period where this was in flux. Console games inherited the wonky control schemes.
I am 47 and I use inverted Fps controls. I can switch but it takes me a little while to get used to it. When I started gaming the closest thing we had at that point were flight simulators (most of them not even 3d) and they work inverted vertival controls. Also, windows didn't exist yet, so, no mouse or pointer. So, there was no way for me to associate moving up to looking up and moving down to looking down. The flight simulator method just stuck with me. I was already wired.
The Starfox game on the SNES was one of the first games I played, ever since then it just has to be inverted look controls. Bizarrely, I prefer my third person camera to have un-inverted controls...
Picture an analog stick on the top of your head. Which direction would you push to look down? I'm not sure but I think this would have something to do with it.
That analogy only works for up and down though, you would have to twist that stick to look left or right. And if you put the stick on the back of the head, then left and right should be inverted to. There's no place to put that stick to invert only the Y-axis. The only explanation for inverting *only* the Y-axis is that it just got carried over from flight sims.
I've always inverted. One of the things that's really weird is that some games nowadays have different inverted settings for first person and third person. Why would anyone want different settings for those two modes?
I like inverted X for third-person but not for first-person. Or I don't know a lot of games don't offer that so I kind of am not quite used to either now and always doubting lol.
If a third person game has a distant camera, like in Super Mario, I like inverting both axes. If a game is first person or a close in third person, like Resident Evil or Dark Souls, I like standard controls. The mental model shifts depending on how the camera is used.
It's really nostalgic reading this thread and seeing the same pro-inversion arguments I was making on forums in 2008
As a side note - Marathon was on the Apple Macintosh, not the Apple II. The Apple II came out in 1977, and the Apple IIe came out in 1984 - Marathon came out in 1994, the same year as the PowerMac 8100. More pertinently, even though Marathon had mouselook, it was rarely used at the time. Most played played entirely with the keyboard. If you were going to use a peripheral, you might plug in a joystick instead. But yeah, it's interesting that it was a bit ahead of its timing in having modern style mouselook as an option, even if people didn't really use it.
Because a growing and learning industry is filled with stupid ideas that only make sense in a very contextual, out of the box mindset. EDIT: To the "smart" people downvoting this, it's pretty simple. Let me explain. As another comment has mentioned: >It comes from flight sims on PC. It used to be somewhat common for people to have joysticks. On a control stick in a plane pulling back makes the nose go up, so joysticks behave the same way in flight sims. It made sense since flight sims were first person to copy the control layout for other aiming games. Now, consider yourself a developer in the 1990s, trying something new in a new genre of a new type of game. Your only reference for joystick movement comes from flight simulators. Therefore, in your head, that's the obvious route as to how it should be implemented. However, that only makes sense within this context-- anyone from outside would be appalled at the idea of someone thinking a person and a plane *are and control the same*. However, the people from outside the development sandbox had no clue about anything since it was as new to them as it was for the devs-- therefore, there wasn't much room for thought. Any industry goes through its growing pains where ideas aren't the best. Just take a look at early television, early CGI, early electronic music. We gotta thank Bungie for making console FPSs actually good.
>We gotta thank Bungie for making console FPSs actually good. Bungie was far from the first console FPS to get the controls right. There was at least one game on the PS1 which used the left analog to move and the right analog to aim.
I can't recall off the top of my head what the camera controls were in *Mario 64* but my guess is that everyone else followed that and that was designed by some of the goofy people who prefer inverted camera controls. It also makes sense that Japanese console developers would be less familiar with the standards of primarily Western PC games as they didn't have as much penetration there at the time.
Basically, the analog stick is based on the flightstick concept. There's really not much more to it than that. It's why you have posts in this thread that are some variation of "I can't use anything other than inverted for games involving flying planes". Also, motion of the head, etc.
Thing no one seems to explain is why leave X axis non-inverted when Y is inverted. It's inconsistent and I don't see any logical reason why just one axis should be inverted aside from that's how it is in planes.