If you look at 3D games that allow you to control the camera using the mouse--most notably first-person and third-person shooter style games--you'll usually find two specific details:
- By default, pushing the mouse forward makes the camera look up, and pulling back looks down.
- The option to reverse this (forward=down) is called "invert Y axis" or something similar.
I've never understood that, and it's always seemed backwards to me, to the point where I get wildly disoriented in any game with default settings on. It seems intuitively obvious that the mouse (or, even more so, a thumbstick, which even looks kind of like a head sitting atop a neck) is modeling the perspective character's head. Move left, you look left. Move right, you look right. Push forward, the head pushes forward, and you look down... right?
In fact, this orientation was the default in a lot of early 3D games, such as flight simulators, MechWarrior 2, etc. But at some point it changed, and people started calling the intuitive orientation "inverted" and disabling it by default.
Are there any historical reasons behind this reversal of the default camera control orientation? Any articles, perhaps, on the rationale behind changing it, or studies showing why it was a desirable change to make?