I recently had a chat with a friend of mine about this very website, and she asked about the significance of the title, Invert Mouse. Duh! I thought it was obvious. It is to me, but then I've been gaming since the Cretaceous Period, so I'm hardly an 'everyman' yardstick.

She's a non-gamer, and when I started my simple explanation it became rapidly clear this was harder to verbalise that I first thought (although the six pints of Scuttock's Old Dirigible may have had something to do with it).

So while non-gamers are hardly the core target audience for my musings, I don't want to alienate anyone if I can help it, so I guess it's only fair to explain myself.

The Stick of Joy

If you are a gamer of a certain age (you probably started gaming before 1985), chances are you cut your videogame canines using one button joysticks. Chances are too, that with said "Kempston Competition Pros" you were playing a myriad of first-person flying games - such as Elite, Frontier, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and the vector-tastic Star Wars.

These games utilised 'flight-like' controls - push the stick forward to dive, back to climb - and so when the FPS genre arrived (or at least the ones you could look up and down in), these controls stuck. Now it was 'forward to look down, back to look up'.

In the early days of the FPS, players could reverse (or 'Invert') the up/down controls, but this was a rarity for gamers and the default remained the flight sim model.

The beginning of the end

I'm not sure when or why the default switched. I suspect it had something to do with the death of the joystick and the rise of the gamepad. The Intellivision, Sega Master System, NES and PlayStation all featured controllers that you used with your thumbs rather than your fist. This meant no pull or push action when going up/down (or down/up), and I this suspect broke the logical connection between controlling a game and thinking you were flying a plane.

For this new generation of gamers, sending a crosshair towards something at the top of the screen (by looking 'up') was the same as sending a Virtua Tennis player 'up' the screen into the net, or thrusting their R-Type ship into the air to avoid incoming fire/obstacles/alien-penis-like-attack-proboscis. For all of them, the logical movement on the pad was to press 'up' (the 'compass' point furthest from you); but for us gaming dinosaurs, the only way was down.

I may be stretching it a bit here, but I suspect it may also have something to do with how the gamepad is held. A joystick would likely be on a table or knee, parallel with the floor, so the control directions are on a horizontal plane - left, right, forward, back. In my experience, gamepads are rarely held 'flat', and reclining sofa players control on the vertical - left, right, up, down. At this angle, the new school of thought begins to make sense (if it weren't complete ungodly heresy, of course).

Betamax gamer

The words 'Invert Mouse' or 'Invert Y-Axis' are commonly found in the first place I begrudgingly go when I load up a new game on my console or PC - the Options screen. As far as I'm concerned, you're the one whose controls are inverted not mine, but if millions of people (or in this case, pixels) repeatedly tell you that you're wrong, you start to believe it. So when I'm asked 'Invert Mouse?' - like a 1950s air stewardess asking "Non-smoking cabin, sir?" - I have to answer, sadly, "yes".

So it is with curmudgeonly bitterness that I have named my site InvertMouse. I'm not looking to connect with the trash-talking Xbox-masses, or be down with the latest PSN Clan tea-bagging some Noob. I've been gaming longer than them. I know more than them. And regardless of what my position on the score table may suggest, I am better than them (honest). If you think you are too, it's you InvertMouse wants to be talking to.

Richard Fentiman
13th November 2009