Featured Image Credit: Sony, Meme
Topics: PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Nintendo Switch
It started as a seemingly innocent Reddit question: "People who play with the Y-axis inverted in any game that doesn't involve flying planes, why?"
It is an odd choice given that flying games are the only games that have a genuine reason for choosing inverted. Interesting answers flooded in with people defending why they're playing games wrong (I genuinely don't care which you use, but I'll poke the bear).
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Among the first few comments were people saying they grew up on retro games like "Goldeneye, Super Mario 64 and GTA III back in the day", which all used inverted as the default. Nowadays the standard is the opposite, but one Redditor points out that the easiest answer is, "I owned an N64".
Another comment tried to put it simply by saying, "You could also ask this question: to look down, would you tilt your head forward or back?" This was explained further, "Tilt head back to look up - tilt stick back to look up," which, in its own funny way, makes a lot of sense.
The issue, really, is muscle-memory. Many of the inverted players seem to come from an older era of gaming when stick-based controllers were a relatively new thing and companies were constantly changing the option.
"Started that way... never bothered to learn the other way around," seemed to be a very popular comeback, with another chiming in with, "I'm 45. This is classic setup and I literally can't unlearn it." So, basically, if your knees hurt from simply sleeping, it's likely you're old enough to remember a time when this was the norm.
Perhaps the best reply to the question is, "Because it's correct and the rest of you are weird sickos." Very direct. This whole argument is akin to pineapple on pizza, or which direction the toilet paper should hang. There's never a winner.