Some players feel they are embodying the character, while others feel they are controlling them. Also, many inverters feel that inverting the Y-axis actually brings us closer to human movement because we tilt our heads backwards to look up and forwards to look down. “The only published study on this I came across – Frischmann, et al, 2015 – found just the opposite, with Y axis inverters reporting higher levels of both presence and immersion.” This might be why it’s the axis inverters who are the most passionate and defensive when this issue comes up on Twitter. This would suggest that non-inverters are more immersed in the experience, but Corbett disputes this. So one way of interpreting this could be that the non-inverters are fully inhabiting the avatar as a body, while the inverters are controlling it as a vehicle. “Players who invert are ‘acting on’ the avatar, with the controls either behind or on top of the head controlling the avatar.” “From a cognitive perspective, players who don’t invert are ‘acting as’ the avatar, with movement/steering originating from between the avatar’s eyes, controlling the camera,” says Dr Jennifer Corbett, a lecturer in psychology at Brunel University London’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience. One theory involves how the player perceives their relationship with the character or vehicle they are controlling. Inverting or not inverting may also involve differences in spatial perception and the interpretation of information on a screen. Thus, I think that learning to use a controller with a sufficiently high degree of skill is likely to involve the development of a fairly ingrained mapping between input and expected action.” In short: it’s not just that you have a casual preference for inverting the Y axis if you started out on inverted controls, you’ve developed a range of skills that absolutely rely on inversion.īut habitual use is not the only possibility. This is consistent with the sense we have of a tool being like ‘an extension of your arm’ when we are sufficiently adept at using it. For example, holding a stick changes the way the brain responds to its peri-personal space – the space just outside of an arm’s reach – remapping the areas considered ‘out of reach’. “We know that the human brain is highly adept at using tools and that it adapts to tool use. “When we use a controller, we’re interacting with a fairly complex, and highly adaptable, tool,” says Dr Ross Goutcher, a psychology lecturer at the University of Stirling. This is also the case with some highly influential first-person shooters, including TimeSplitters 2, GoldenEye and Turok, all of which encouraged an inverted Y axis as the correct way to play. The chances are, if you grew up with Microsoft Flight Sim or the LucasArts X-Wing and Tie-Fighter games, you have become used to pulling back on the controls to move upwards.
This is especially true of older gamers – in the 1980s and early 1990s, flight sims were a hugely popular genre, and of course, the controls would be inverted to match an aircraft yoke or joystick. responsible for a generation of control inverters? Photograph: MicrosoftĪ lot of people who invert the Y axis do so because the games they started playing had that control set-up as the default option.
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