To be clear, this only concerns one axis of one analog stick. None of the other axes or buttons are affected, so calling it “inverting the controls” is a poor description to begin with.

This is nothing more than standard flight stick configuration. If you were to hold your game controller up in front of your face, with the handles pointing downward and the sticks pointing at your eyes, then flight controls might seem like the Y axis is inverted, because you would have to push the stick up to aim down. But if you hold the controller parallel to the floor, with the sticks pointing toward the sky like those on an airplane, then you push forward to aim down, just as humans lean forward to look down. Likewise, you pull back to aim up, just as we lean back to look up. It’s very sensible.

I invert both X and Y. But I guess I’m aging myself a bit here.

When I bought my first PC in 2002 I also bought a stylus for it and installed Linux on it. And on Linux GIMP was working with two input devices at the same time, so I put the mouse on the left to switch between tools and the stylus on the right to draw with. After a month or two the stylus broke down and I threw it away, but I didn’t switch the mouse back, instead I still use it with my left hand which is very frustrating for everyone who wants to use my computer.

But because games use wasd, I had to move the mouse to my right hand, so every time I want to play something I have to move the mouse and the mouse pad to the right and then afterwards back to the left. Sometimes I forget to move it back but after some minutes it feels so weird that I realize it and move it back.

Oh one more thing, when I was very little I used to use my left hand to eat, when my grandma saw it she forced my parents to bind my left hand to the chair so I would eat with the right hand, so they did and this is how I became right handed.

Aiming from the tip of the gun vs aiming from the back/butt of the gun

she forced my parents to bind my left hand to the chair […] and this is how I became right handed.

Hahaha that is such an oldschool thing to do

Someone who played a lot of flight sims in the 1980s may have unconsciously taught themselves to invert and now they consider that their innate preference

Yes. Yes, I do.

For what it’s worth, I’ve played with my buddy’s controller while he refilled the chips bowl enough to give uninverted a fair try. I play fine at it. I just don’t like it.

I played Star Fox a decent amount, and some other flight sims on DOS, but for me when you’re flying a plane it makes sense to think of up as pushing forward on the flight controls of a plane. However, I could never get used to thinking of pushing a head forward by using up, so I only play flight sims inverted. If there’s an FPS game where you have to pilot a plane (or even a sub I guess) I have to pause and change the controls in the middle if the plane section forces me to use the same directions as my look/aim from the rest of the game.

This is me. Not just with games, but with two-finger scrolling on a track pad. It feels right. Pull up, push down.

The difference is what you’re “pushing”. Are you pushing the scroll bar on the right of the page? Or are you pushing the page? I grew up with the scroll bar, so mouse wheel down makes page move up.

Nowadays, phones don’t even have room to display a scroll bar, so people have gotten the idea to flick upwards. If you’re on a laptop trackpad, that’s probably gonna carry over.

I’ve always played inverted because it just makes more sense to me.

but at some point I just gave up on controllers altogether. They’re too annoying to target accurately. Some fancy steam game tells me it plays better with a controller? No thanks, I’ll stick to games that’ll let me use keyboard and mouse, where I’ve been training my whole life to click on tiny buttons. Controller just feels like hard mode for no reason.

I started playing games in the 2000s and bought one old game where the default was inverted controls

Trying to play that game broke my brain. I don’t remember if I eventually realized it was a setting I could turn off

I learned what a joystick was from my grandpa who used it exclusively to play WWI and WWII flight simulators. Almost all of my use of a joystick before the age of 5 was on one of those games.

Today I am equally comfortable with joysticks set either way. Guess it’s just a personal preference?

Edit: maybe it’s because thumbsticks feel a bit inherently different to me because of the different grip.

I mean… this is basically the same as “natural” scrolling. It’s what metaphor you’re using. Either you think of pushing up as “looking up”, or you see pushing up as if you’re rotating a physical camera forwards. So basically the question is if you imagine your camera as an actual object. That’s why planes often control that way, you’re rotating the plane that way rather than the camera, the object is right there so more people will mentally attach to it.

Personally, I played in the era where this wasn’t always configurable, and can pretty quickly adapt to either, and sometimes even get mixed up where both feel unintuitive half of the time lol, but I usually defer to the “up to look up” setting, to prevent myself from getting mixed up like that when switching between games.