MTG Salvation

so as most people on this site should know, a fair number of console games use the right analog stick to control the camera. Some people, like myself, like the camera normal, with left moving the camera left, right moving the camera right etc. However, my roommate uses an inverted camera, with up moving the camera down and down moving it up, etc. So this is just a simple poll question: do you prefer an inverted camera or a normal camera? This is a pretty simple poll so elaboration might be hard, but feel free to elaborate if you have some reason why!

I play inverted, and it drives all of my friends nuts.
But I learned how to play shooters from Golden Eye and Unreal (the old one) and both of those games were inverted only, so that's how I play and how I'm comfortable.

Depends on the game. For simulators (especially airplane/spacship simulators -- pulling a stick should make a plane point upward, not down), I prefer inverted. For everything else, I prefer normal.

(Note: I've never heard of anyone inverting the x-axis on their controller (though I know some games allow it), so when I talk about "inverted" I'm just talking about the y-axis.)

I've actually thought a lot about why some people prefer inverted and some people prefer non-inverted. I'm an inverted user myself, and it always sounds weird to me when people describe inverted as "Move the stick down to look up." That doesn't make sense to me, because I don't think of the direction I move the stick for looking up as "Down"; I think of it as "Back." That made me think that "inverted players" and "non-inverted players" think about analog sticks in fundamentally different ways. Here's my theory:


Non-Inverted Players think of a thumbstick analogously to a d-pad. With the way most people hold controllers, you actually move the thumbstick forward/back to look up/down, but "d-pad up" is the same direction as forward and "d-pad down" is the same direction as back. So if you think of the stick in the same way as a d-pad, you'll tend to set the stick to "normal."


Inverted Players relate to a thumbstick analogously to a flightstick (self-explanatory) or to their own heads. Think about it; to look up, you tilt your head back, and you tilt it forward to look down. If you play with the controls inverted, you'll move the stick the same way you would your own head to look up and down.


I'd actually love to design some sort of psychological research to test this idea. I'd also be curious to see if players from different backgrounds tend to go one way or the other... for instance, I imagine players who start on flight sims might tend to go inverted, but are there other, less obvious correlations?

I used to be inverted with Halo 1 + 2. Then I took a LONG break from console games and played a lot of WoW. After that, with Halo 3 and GoW and Halo Reach and such, I switched to non-inverted.

It really depends. I was a BIG PC gamer in the 90s, and so I'm used to a mouse and keyboard for gaming, and I like moving the stick in the direction I want to look. My friends who were pretty much just console people are the opposite.

In first person view, I like non-inverted, in third person view, I prefer inverted.

I just can't get my head around inverted controls… I grew up with older consoles (Sega etc) that only had d-pads and no analogue, so I'm accustomed to "up" on the controls corresponding to an upwards movement in game.

I can do inverted, but I prefer regular over inverted. Though, flight/mecha simulators, has to be invert for that~

Inverted, I always grew up on goldeneye and unreal, along with my dad playing flight simms.

But like a pro, my (as of today) ex girlfriend bet me dinner I couldn't play regular, and I pulled out a 28-4 on blackops. It just felt awkward the whole time and 3 of the 4 days were because I looked up or down when it should have been the other.