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.
I play with non-inverted controls 99% of the time, but for some reason when I’m flying a starship/plane in first-person, I invert the flight controls. If I’m in a ship in third-person, I tend to prefer non-inverted although I can play with both. I think it matters how physically close I am to the fulcrum (wrong word?) of the rotation, combined with the fact that the thing I’m rotating isn’t myself, but the contraption I’m travelling in. On foot in first-person, inverted controls don’t work for me at all.
It’s like if you imagine you’re controlling a seesaw in a 3D environment. The seesaw is positioned such that it forms a vertical line on the screen in a top-down or isometric view. You’re adding or removing weight to the bottom-most end. If you press down on your controller, you add pressure/weight and so the top-most end moves upwards, which is equivalent to the front of your plane/ship rising upwards. I think that’s kinda why it feels more intuitive for me to fly ships with inverted controls. It’s about where you place your consciousness in 3D space.
Another example is scrolling a document on a computer. Some people I know, when they say “scroll up for me”, they mean “move the document upwards”, while others say it to mean “move the viewport upwards in relation to the document” (so the text moves downwards). Besides it being a simple language issue, I think the idea that one person thinks of the system as being “I control a viewport” and another person thinks of it as “I control the document itself” is similar to the inverted/non-inverted controls debate. Where your mind’s eye is sitting is hugely important.