Why do some gamers invert their controls? Scientists now have answers, but they’re not what you think

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.

You may think I just upvoted you...

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 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.