How I Learned to Stop Playing Inverted and Love the Default Controls

For the marathon this past weekend (remember: you can still donate!), I played Hearthstone and then Left 4 Dead 2, and for the first time in the long hours I’ve put into the latter, I did not invert the controls. For years, I’ve been inverting Y axes in dozens of games, for hundreds, thousands of hours, and suddenly, now, I’m not.

I say suddenly, but it wasn’t sudden; for months, I felt lost in games, like no control scheme felt quite right. I’d try inverted and not, and go back and forth, and now, finally, I’m playing default controls. It sounds like such a small thing—I’m playing like most people play!—but the journey has been a long and arduous one.

I played a lot of video games as a kid. So many video games, in fact, that I read game strategy guides for funsies, as part of my normal reading rotation, even for games I didn’t play and was never going to play (Jeff Rovin’s books were my jam), but from maybe age ten to age eighteen, I played less. I’m not really sure why. I didn’t get any new consoles, and that was part of it, but maybe it just wasn’t that important to me for a while. I played card games, certainly; I was a pretty serious Magic: The Gathering player, but video games? I stuck to my old consoles until college, when I had access to friends’ systems, and then all bets were off. I played a lot, hours and hours of games like Monster Rancher 2 and Bushido Blade, but perhaps the most formative game I’ve ever played, the game wth the biggest impact? GoldenEye 64.

GoldenEye was everything, because you could play with friends, and trash talk, and drink, or smoke, or do whatever you wanted. You could share games with the people you cared about. Sure, other games had allowed that kind of companionship, but for me, at least, GoldenEye was the pinnacle, the best multiplayer experience. Three or four people, house rules, banter, yelling; nothing had ever been as fun as a robust session of GoldenEye. I learned how to run and gun in GoldenEye. In fact, it may be said I learned how to love games there—and GoldenEye? Was inverted by default. It imprinted on me, and for years, it’s stuck. I’ve been stuck.

These days, because about half my classes take place in game spaces, and half my outside research revolves around games, I spend a lot of time playing with others and watching others play, and I’ve become a little ashamed about my play habits. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with playing inverted controls, it’s just that when you’re passing the controller, it can be a bit of a pain if you’re the one person who plays “backwards.” I’ve learned to watch, to talk, to stick to the background, to come up with some reason someone else should play instead of me when we’re in classroom settings, just to avoid having to switch the controls around. At home, in shared games, it isn’t an issue; my partner and I play State of Decay together and for our games, inverted is the default—when he prepares to exit, he switches the look, because I am the primary player and he loves and respects me (I mean, it’s not like I can threaten to divorce classmates if they mock my “backwards” play). In class, and when I play with friends, things are a little different, and I’ll tell you: good-natured ribbing only feels good-natured the first 300 times or so. After that, you start to get defensive. After that, you start explaining. “I played so much GoldenEye,” you insist. “This is my normal.” Because you are older than your friends, you feel old. You feel like you are from another era.

I remember playing hours and hours of Freedom Fighters, of Halo, the original, with friends. I don’t remember if the controls were auto-inverted in those games. I don’t remember when I started switching them myself for the controls that felt more natural. I just remember never playing any other way.

Four or five months ago, I started to notice I was having trouble playing games that involved looking around. Puzzle games or games with restricted control schemes? Fine. But anytime I sat down to play on the Xbox One, for instance, in any game with weapons? I felt disoriented. I was playing inverted, as I always did. As was my default. But it felt wrong somehow. I tried switching and that felt wrong, too. Nothing was natural. No matter how I played, I had to remind myself constantly: do this to look around. Do this. Do this. Move the controller. For the first time in a decade or more, gaming no longer felt natural.

Gaming, however, is the center of my research. Understandably, I panicked a little. What if I could no longer play? I’ve never been the most amazing at action-based games; I’m competent in games I know, maybe better than average sometimes, but never great. Suddenly, though, I was incapable. I couldn’t play Destiny, I struggled in Deus Ex, in Metal Gear Solid V. I had trouble with State of Decay, for goodness sake, and readers of the blog know that is my game, and after seven, maybe eight hundred hours, I was stumbling all over the place.

Games are my life. Not in a hobby sense. In a professional sense.

Reader, I was scared.

And then one day, something different happened when I switched from inverted to default. For a minute, it felt weird, and then it didn’t. It felt fine.

There’s been a lot of discussion about why some people play inverted controls while others don’t, and most people trace it back to a couple of points in gaming history (and here’s a good video on the subject). Flight simulators are usually the first thing mentioned, but I never played many flight simulators. Oh, like most people in their 30s, I fooled around with Microsoft Flight Simulator a little, but I didn’t like it. In fact—and this is funny, considering the topic—the controls felt weird to me. Really, this was probably because I’ve always preferred controllers to mouse+keyboard ( know, I’m a terrible human), but regardless, I never got much out of them.

But lots of other people did play flight sims, and they made games. And when they made systems that gave players more control, control on the Y-axis, back then, those controls were inverted. And that’s the era in which I learned. That’s when Y-axis look styles were imprinted on me. Since then, I’ve sought that style if it wasn’t the default. Until, that is, very, very recently.

Here’s what I find most mystifying: I don’t know what happened with my brain. I would like to know; I hope someone has an answer. But after that uncomfortable period of adjustment, when I would flip back and forth between inverted controls and defaults, I now feel completely comfortable playing default controls. I played Left 4 Dead 2 for hours this weekend, a game I had exclusively played with inverted controls in the past, and my results were similar; sometimes in the lead, sometimes not. I was the same player. Just backwards. Just default. “Normal.”

What happened to me?

I did not set out to switch. In fact, I had a long conversation with a friend not long ago in which I pinpointed GoldenEye as the possible cause of my play style, a historical moment that gave me a reason for playing as I did. Reading about the design of GoldenEye meant I wasn’t some kind of freak, but instead  a gamer who had undergone a particular kind of training. I was simply a product of an earlier era. There was nothing wrong with me. For the first time, I felt secure in my play choices (thanks to games research!).

But my brain rebelled. What happened? I felt uncomfortable and wrong somehow before I started switched. It’s as though someone slipped in and reprogrammed my brain and my fingers, and I feel like I can’t fulfill the title of this piece, because the truth is, I don’t know how I learned or changed. I don’t know how I started suddenly playing default control styled after more than a decade of purposeful inversion, but here I am. All I can say is, well, I guess old gamers can learn new tricks. I just wish I understood why. It could be that I took a long break from shooters, that I spent months playing other games, games with different control setups, but could that really remap my brain in this way? It’s true that for the last couple of years, I have played fewer action games and shooters than I have other game types, but I’ve still played plenty of first-person games, so I’m not sure there’s an explanation there. I’m not sure there’s an explanation anywhere, but if someone has one, I’d love to hear it.