After testing random people with various computer programs that asked them to rotate objects, they found that some people were able to complete the tasks with inverted or non inverted controls, despite the fact that they had claimed to prefer the opposite. The researchers claim that some people's brains are just wired to perform better one way or the other despite how they originally learned.
The explanation I've heard for your trackpad argument is that the trackpad is "grabbing" the page or whatever, but I've never made that connection. Trackpad gestures to me are equivalent to the scrollwheel, they're just a different way of interfacing with it. The only thing that "grabs" the page is my finger when it's on a touch screen.
They're not though. A trackpad processes relative inputs, while a touchscreen processes absolute inputs. If I touch the corner of my trackpad, it doesn't produce a click on the corresponding corner of the screen like a touchscreen would. Likewise a touch and slide doesn't drag stuff, it moves the cursor relative to where it was.
It's much more similar to a mouse. In fact, if you just imagine your finger is a mouse, you've just described all of the functions of a touchpad except gestures, and gestures are just replacements for the buttons (two tap for right click, two finger slide for scroll wheel, etc).
I used to play inverted then started gaming on pc. Now when I use a controller its like neither is good for me - my brain will sometimes think inverted and other times non-inverted mid play session
I find that for me this happens especially often in 3rd person camera control. And I think it has to do with the distance between the camera and the controlled actor.
Think driving a car, and the camera moving up close to the car when you're under something like a bridge which would otherwise clip the camera. At that point my preference for camera controll switches from 'orbit object' mode to 'aim' mode so to say.
Yeah, that screws me up too. For first person games, joystick forward to look down makes intuitive sense to me, because I'm controlling the axis of the head (comes from airplane sims). For third person games, now I'm controlling the camera, and it's not so clear.
I think the core of this dispute is the intuition of each person of what exactly they're moving and how they're moving it.
Like I have never once considered, until just now by reading your comment, that the stick could controlling my characters head. I've always intuitively thought that I'm controlling "the point in space that my character is looking at."
Changing this makes one way make more sense than the other. Like, despite my preference for non inversion, I would fully concede that if I were to imagine the stick controlling the head directly that inversion makes plenty of sense.
Yup. I started w/ flight sims, so the controller controlling the airplane made sense. When I transitioned to FPS games, the controller controlling the head made logical sense. I'm not the character, I'm controlling the character, so why shouldn't the character work like a plane?
There's fewer and fewer people who use inverted controls, I've found. Makes sense, I'm old and it just became muscle memory for me after playing Goldeneye til my thumbs bled back in the day. It's more of a pain in the ass now, since non-inverted seems to be the norm and I always have to hunt to change it any time I fire up a game with camera controls.
Fascinating read.
I liked learning about the "Simon effect", only knew about similar, non-spatial ones (colours)...
And I might give non-inverted controls a try, although being a die-hard inverter.
At least it will be some brain stimulus to keep me from cognitive aging too fast. Like changing the mouse hand from right to left and back again once in a while.
And at best I will become the unbeatable Über-Player, because in truth I am a hidden non-inverter! ;-)
Why do they mean by "inverted controls? I remember that in some SNES games you could literally invert your controls and play with ABXY as if it were your D-Pad, and your D-Pad as yours ABXY buttons.
Usually it refers to joystick directions being reversed (common for flight simulators) or the "Southpaw" control methods on console controllers (designed for lefty users).
The above principle works for third person, too - if you're conceptualizing moving a "handle" behind the camera rather than being in the camera itself, it's inverted.
Not a true sim, but Ace Combat 7 novice controls are non-inverted. I feel like Far Cry 5/6 and definitely Fortnite put the non-inverted pitch control on the planes, which were not the focus of the game. I assumed other plane-including games did the same.
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