Why do Some Gamers Invert Their Controls?

jelizondo writes:

The Guardian has a very interesting article about Human Computer Interactions and its implications beyond gamers:

Five years ago, on the verge of the first Covid lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games?

I thought a few hardcore gamers would be interested in the question. Instead, more than one million people read the article, and the ensuing debate caught the attention of Dr Jennifer Corbett (quoted in the original piece) and Dr Jaap Munneke, then based at the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London.

At the time, the two were conducting research into vision science and cognitive neuroscience, but when the country locked down, they were no longer able to test volunteers in their laboratory. The question of controller inversion provided the perfect opportunity to study the neuroscience of human-computer interactions using remote subjects. They put out a call for gamers willing to help research the reasons behind controller inversion and received many hundreds of replies.

And it wasn't just gamers who were interested. "Machinists, equipment operators, pilots, designers, surgeons - people from so many different backgrounds reached out," says Corbett. "Because there were so many different answers, we realised we had a lot of scientific literature to review to design the best possible study. Readers' responses turned this study into the first of its kind to try to figure out what actually are those factors that shape how users configure their controllers. Personal experiences, favourite games, different genres, age, consoles, which way you scroll with a mouse ... all of these things could potentially be involved."

This month the duo published their findings in a paper entitled "Why axis inversion? Optimising interactions between users, interfaces, and visual displays in 3D environments". And the reason why some people invert their controls? It's complicated.

The process started with participants completing a survey about their backgrounds and gaming experiences. "Many people told us that playing a flight simulator, using a certain type of console, or the first game they played were the reasons they preferred to invert or not," says Corbett. "Many also said they switched preferences over time. We added a whole new section to the study based on all this feedback."

What they discovered through the cognitive testing was that a lot of assumptions being made around controller preferences were wrong. "None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted," says Corbett. "It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks." So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. "Though they tended to be faster, they didn't get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.