Consequently, Corbett says that it may improve you as a gamer to try the controller setup you are currently not using. “Non-inverters should give inversion a try – and inverters should give non-inversion another shot,” she says. “You might even want to force yourself to stick with it for a few hours. People have learned one way. That doesn’t mean they won’t learn another way even better.
Same, for me it’s about perspective and what I’m controlling. In an FPS, I’m controlling the view window and I want it to directly follow my intention: non-inverted.
In a 3rd person game like Dark Souls, I’m controlling an external camera. It’s the angle I’m viewing my character from and not necessarily the frame of the scene I am considering: inverted.
Flying games? Inverted. Rail shooter like Panzer Dragoon, I’m controlling the absolute position of a targeting reticle: non-inverted.
Those are just by preferences and how I perceive things, some people may take the opposite stand than me. But even those aren’t strict rules, if a specific game doesn’t feel right I’ll try mixing it up to see if something works better for whatever reason.
That’s similar to how I do it, except that I also invert most FPSes.
Basically, my mental model is that I move the camera around. In third-person games with a from-behind perspective, the character’s position is usually a fulcrum that the camera pivots around. So if I want to look up I have to pull the camera down. Hence inverted.
For first-person games I’m less consistent with inverting but I usually do. The camera may not pivot around a point ahead of it but in my head it pivots around a point directly at its front. Some games don’t feel like that to me but most do.
That’s also why I insist on inverting my mouse wheel, by the way – my mental model is not that I send up or down commands to the computer, it’s that I push the document up or down with my finger like I would on a smartphone. The mouse wheel is a touchscreen surrogate. Having the document move up when I push it up feels wrong.