Why is it intuitive to have the up and down arrow keys reversed in flight simulation games?
Here's my guess for how it feels to control a flying vehicle. Also, here are some bits of flight dynamic terminology.
Pretend you are sitting in a plane. Imagine the plane has a big imaginary stick poking out the top of it, and you are holding a flight stick whose position represents how you want the imaginary stick to move.
In that case, how would you make the plane go up? You would pull the stick backward, because that would make the plane tilt backward and its nose point upward.
To make the plane go left, you could yaw by twisting the flight stick... but I don't think real planes can do that altogether well, so instead you would tilt the stick left for roll and then pull back for upward pitch. [Edit: See comments, apparently planes can move this way just not super fast.]
But as for whether you are just used to controls this way, I think so. A whole lot of people prefer non-inverted Y axis controls in games. But as you and I both know, those people are crazy ;). Once you get used to controls like these for flight games, it makes sense that would translate to preferring inverted Y for FPS games as well - that's what happened with me and StarFox.
Most possible is that's because of how the real plane controls are made. If you have ever played with a joystick, the default behavior for the plane/spaceship/etc is to lean downwards when you push the joystick ahead. It is made do be similar in general with real plane controls.
While controlling up/down is clear in a 2D side-scroller, in 3D first-person-perspective games, you have the option of thinking of up/down controls in different ways:
- "Up is towards the top of the screen, down is towards the bottom." In this case, you think of the joystick as a symbolic representation of left/right/up/down. The joystick represents a direction.
- "To see up, I must tilt my head back. To see down, I tilt my head forward." In this case, you think of the joystick as mimicking the movements of your body. The joystick is a movement, not a direction.
This is just my theory, but seems reasonable. I liken it also to the concept in 2D top-down driving games where you can usually choose between the joystick representing directions on the screen (left will drive to the left of the screen, regardless of car direction), or the joystick representing the actions of the driver (left will turn the car left, which could be any direction relative to the screen).
Maybe there's some psychological inferences buried in there too, like cold-hearted people choose non-inverted-Y-axis. Or crazy people :P