Poll: Do you invert and how old are you -- testing a hypothesis

[Gildan Bladeborn]

28, and I do not invert my FPS controls and think it's bloody weird when people do. It makes sense to invert the Y-axis if what you are playing is actually a flight simulator, because that's how a flight-yoke really works... but generally those are played with joysticks.

As a PC gamer who owns no consoles and sees this modern day predominance of FPS games on consoles as bizarre and unnatural given they have precisely the wrong style of controls for those games, I naturally enough play FPS titles with a mouse.

Fact: Nobody turns on an inverted Y-axis to use their mouse for normal, every day computing, because that is weird.

When you use a mouse, you move the device around and the cursor directly reflects the direction of that movement, only translated to the horizontal axis rather than a vertical, since screens typically directly face the user. So pushing the mouse away makes the cursor go up, pulling it back towards you makes it go down, and left and right are left and right, nothing out of the ordinary there.

So why then, after firing up an FPS title, would you suddenly want your mouse controls to do the exact opposite of what they do all the other times you use a mouse? Flight-sim mouse controls are unintuitive and far less precise than mouse-look, where you point and shoot in the same manner that you point and click in ordinary mouse operation.

Now if you're playing FPS games on a console, then the mechanism you're using to aim is a joystick, and I could see inverting the controls making more sense then if you cut your teeth with joysticks playing flight sims, so I can sort of understand why people want to do that. Inverting a mouse though is just bizarre.

 

[IsraelRocks]

Finally a thread with a poll that is not about my avatar/last gun i used/ last thing i ate / last green thing that went in my mouth.

i'm 25 and i was a flight Sim nut growing up, still am actually.

But i think i am a part of a demographic you ignored. people who played Sims with joysticks.

Actually, I kind of assumed that if you were playing a flight sim back in the day, you used a joystick; I've even got one sitting on my desk, because certain flight sims (Especially the X-Wing games from X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter on) require one to even boot up, and the rest just play better with a flight stick. Even when I play Battlefield, I prefer using a flightstick to keyboard and mouse when flying planes or helicopters.

So age is not really a factor here. you are right, gamers over 20 probebly do have joysticks if the played sims (god dammit i miss those star wars sims ).
And younger gamers probably didnt get a change to play alot of sims before they died out (no, the X anthology does not count) and most likely grew up on FPSs.

 

[MoosieMann]

i USED to have inverted until i got to about 12, then i switched to normal. I have used normal for everything except flights sims and flying anything since then. Though it should be said that i played ALOT of of flight sims growing up, was going to be a pilot until i found out that 20/20 vision was required, crushing my dreams.

Captcha: 'eramenam can' sounds like a political slogan. "who can? eramenam can!"

 

[Shock and Awe]

Well im 16 and I use normal aiming, but in flying games like Ace Combat I always invert because that is more similar to how one would use the stick in an actual aircraft.

 

[LuckyClover95]

UH, I HATE inverted. I'm 16 btw.

 

[Thundero13]

I invert since it's what i've usually done, I didn't invert a couple of times but it took me a while to get used to it, when I switched back to inversion I got used to it almost immediately, and I am... well todays my birthday, not sure when I was born exactly though so i'm either 14 or 15 =)

 

[Geek_DR]

Hmm. Interesting result... seems your correlation is holding up. The older the demographic, the more prevalent inverted is.

Im 25 and play normal. I like my thumbsticks to act like a mouse: up is up and down is down.
Inverted only for flight.

 

[InternetFX]

36 and INVERTED for any FPS or flight sim.

I think what makes inverted natural for some people particularly with a mouse is that it somewhat mirrors the motion of your dominant hand/arm/shoulder when firing a two-handed firearm. Consider, you don't move a mouse "up" and "down", you move it forward and backward. Obviously for a flight sim inverted is immediately more natural.

From a FPS perspective for those who invert the Y-axis, body movement, leaning forward to aim and look around, seems more natural and correlated to pushing your mouse forward, even to precise amounts. It especially does for me, and I tend to feel, and want to feel, very physically immersed in FPS games, and I believe using inverted controls influences this.

With a rifle, generally you precision aim with your non-dominant hand, while your dominant arm will make "inverted Y-axis" movements: raising or "pushing" with your dominant hand will lower your aim while lowering or "pulling" will raise it. When playing a FPS with a mouse, most people control aim and firing using their *dominant* hand, so those motions of aiming could feel very natural especially for two-handed guns.

I wonder if people who tend to handle actual firearms more often also have a tendency to invert, and this could be why you see it at a greater percentage of inverters with a 20+ crowd. Amongst my group of friends in the PC crowd, I've noticed those who use an inverted Y-axis with a mouse generally tend to play better, although this is not exclusive even in that group.

Now with a gamepad, this relationship is not really present. I have noticed a correlation where those who grew up on consoles tend to not invert. Generally I see once the choice is made, people still make the same choice switching between PC and console, or more precisely, mouse and gamepad.

 

[loc978]

I'm 30.
I don't invert, because in the early days of shooters before mouse support, I played exclusively on the keyboard, and the y-axis was configurable. I usually had home for up, end for down (with delete and pgdwn for strafing)... such awkward controls, back then.
Quake with its full mouse support was a revelation, and any form of joystick is quite simply inferior for the purpose of first-person perspective gameplay.

That said, of course I keep a joystick inverted for sim games. There is one shooter series I play with a joystick/keyboard combo, and that is Descent.

Just wondering, what shooters were you playing? The only FPS I played that was post look up/look down but pre-mouselook was Dark Forces, which if I remember correctly, didn't allow for the controls to be remapped. Either way, the default was page up to look down, and page down to look up.

That's... actually the game I best remember remapping the controls on... did you have the DOS-native version or the Windows 95 version? I had the Windows one. My roommate just chimed in that he had the mac version... and it had mouse support...

Also, I mapped the same up/down look commands in Doom and Doom2, though they didn't affect aiming at all.

 

[ThreeWords]

I used to play inverted when I was younger because I grew up with Goldeneye and the aiming in Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64, but I took a pretty long break from gaming and when I came back with CoD 2 and Halo, I naturally started using regular controls.

19, not inverted. Though I do play quite a few flying games with an inverted axis(whats the plural of axis? Axii. Axises, Axis'?).

Axes, with a long E, like thesis -> theses.

Axe-ease?

Ot: 16 and indifferent, assuming it's the first time. After that, there's no hope of adjustment.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I'm 30.
I don't invert, because in the early days of shooters before mouse support, I played exclusively on the keyboard, and the y-axis was configurable. I usually had home for up, end for down (with delete and pgdwn for strafing)... such awkward controls, back then.
Quake with its full mouse support was a revelation, and any form of joystick is quite simply inferior for the purpose of first-person perspective gameplay.

That said, of course I keep a joystick inverted for sim games. There is one shooter series I play with a joystick/keyboard combo, and that is Descent.

Just wondering, what shooters were you playing? The only FPS I played that was post look up/look down but pre-mouselook was Dark Forces, which if I remember correctly, didn't allow for the controls to be remapped. Either way, the default was page up to look down, and page down to look up.

That's... actually the game I best remember remapping the controls on... did you have the DOS-native version or the Windows 95 version? I had the Windows one. My roommate just chimed in that he had the mac version... and it had mouse support...

Also, I mapped the same up/down look commands in Doom and Doom2, though they didn't affect aiming at all.

The DOS version; I was unaware that there even was a Windows version, let alone that the Mac version had mouselook. And what version of Doom and Doom 2 were you playing that had mouselook? Some of the source ports may have had it, but the original versions of the game definitely did not.

 

[Corekrash]

Being almost 27, It really depends on the game for me. I voted normal 25+ because for 3rd person shooters like Gears of war etc,.. and 1st person shooters I pretty much can only play comfortably when it isn't inverted, These style of games being most of what I play. But games like Dead rising, Ninja gaiden 2, Assassins creed, I prefer inverted, and I really can't say why

 

[Yoh3333]

16 and normal.
I feel like it's clumsy and it makes no sense to me as of why i would want to do so.
I guess your idea of older people got used to it with the ammount of flight sims back in the days, but heck.

 

[SilverIntoSteel]

24 and no inversion. It confuses and upsets me.

 

[DanielDeFig]

I'm 20, and I invert (which according to the Poll, is very rare). As far as I'm concerned, the joystick represents the back of the vehicle/weapon. Thus, by tilting the back down, the front will point up (Strangely though, I must the x-axis normal, so maybe my logic is broken).

Often when I play with people my age, they get very confused as to why I have to invert the Y axis (causing a short frustrating moment whenever I pass my controller to the next person in line, as they have to switch it back to "normal"), so maybe I shouldn't be surprised about the Poll results.

This is all provided we are talking about console controllers, because i would NEVER invert the Y-axis of my mouse, and I don't see why anyone else would either.

 

[Artina89]

I'm 22 and I am comfortable playing both normally and inverted, the style of the aiming is dependent on who was playing the game last. If it is my dad that last used the game then the controls are usually inverted. If my brother is the one that previously played the game then the controls are normal. I play normal more though, as my brother plays games more than my dad. So, for the poll, I went for normal.

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

20 and I play with the Y-axis inverted and the X-axis normal.

All my friends think I'm weird because of it.

 

[Vykrel]

i play with normal controls always, EXCEPT when they are for piloting an aircraft. thats the only time where ive actually found its easier (not to mention more realistic) to have the controls inverted. i dont really know why

 

[INF1NIT3 D00M]

I always play flight sims with inverted Y because it makes my movement of the stick mirror the movements of a WWII-era flight stick. Even in HAWX for the 360 I use inverted Y.

In everything else, I have normal controls. It just makes sense to me that whenever I point my stick in a given direction, my character's head moves that direction. Or the 3rd person floating camera, or whatever.