You might have seen this in some video game players today. When looking up, players push the opposite direction — they press down in their controllers. They configure the setting of the game and invert Y axis. The question is, what difference does this make? And why do some players bother to do it?
It turns out there is very little research in this area, which is a surprise considering two billion people play games on a regular basis – and as I have discovered on social media, many of them are extremely invested in this issue. However, two of the academics I spoke to about inversion were happy to speculate on what might be happening – and both allowed for one very straightforward possibility: it’s habitual.
A 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. 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.
Habitual use is not the only possibility when it comes to interpreting this type of behavior. Spatial perception and interpretation of the information seen on the screen could also be a possibility.
Check out The Guardian for more details about this topic.
Do you invert the y-axis when you play?
(Image Credit: quakeboy/ Pixabay)