I know exactly where my inverted Y-Axis comes from: Flight Simulation. Like in the real airplane, pushing the yoke forward pitches down, pulling the yoke backwards pitches up. So I do with the mouse, and the joystick, and the controller.

Once adapted, it is impossible to change afterwards.

Drones are even more complicated: left hand/right hand preferences (regarding power and lift) can never be re-learned, so most remote controls come with multiple configurations.

First game you play dictates it for life.

There. I saved them years of research.

Well, I did spend hours playing on flying simulators with the default inverted axis (yoke down to climb up, yoke up to climb down) and I do not invert the axis when playing other types of games. Anecdotal but this is true for my friends that play/played the same type of games.

I don't think this is true. At least not in my case.

Though I am left handed, so maybe the fact that I've spend most of my life adapting to a right handed world has something to do with it.

To me it’s always felt more natural to invert since I tilt my head forward if I want to look down. Do people who prefer not to invert imagine they are controlling the viewport instead of the character or what is going on here?

At least on PC, the common expectation is that your mouse controls the crosshair/cursor position. If you move left, it moves left, if you move up, it moves up. In first person games your crosshair/cursor is also your POV.

> if I want to look down

then you move the joystick down. That's the rationale for us non-inverted Y players :-)

The inverted Y would make more sense if they also used inverted X.

I always think of it as controlling the camera itself, not the view, so to look up, the camera needs to move and/or tilt down. This has always felt more natural to me in 3rd person view games.

This is somewhat valid, though weirdly it doesn't always translate to both axes(?). For example when playing Wind Waker my then GF couldn't handle the left-right camera being "reversed" (from her point of view). In Wind Waker HD they added (or forced?) the option to swap the horizontal axis.

One explanation I once read was imagining a toy figure head mounted on top of the joystick - if you tilt back, it looks up