“Look up.  Now look down.  Interesting.  Now look left.”

That’s the generic dialog for detecting horizontal and vertical controller invert settings in many modern, high production value games.  It’s become quite common, yet fewer than 10% of gamers invert their controls.  If you were to guess “no invert” and just go with it, you’d be right over 90% of the time.

Now, how often do you think a game properly guesses your gamma settings?  Across my three current gaming platforms (360, laptop, desktop), games guess too dark on them almost every time– and I play in the dark!  I struggle for a while, getting shot by things I don’t see, or missing important items that blend into the darkness.  Then I finally bring up the gamma configuration option– and realize I can only see four or five of the ten test bars.  After a fix, the game instantly becomes twice as fun.

I could figure out how to play with non-inverted controls in about 10 minutes.  (My eyes would never develop the ability to see the lower light intensity.)  I would realize the controls were inverted in about a second.  (It often takes me a good half hour of frustration to remember gamma settings.)  The guessed settings for controller inversion are right 90% of the time.  (I see proper gamma guessing in about one of ten games I play.)  The XBox 360 has a game-wide setting for controller inversion.  (No such setting exists for gamma.)

What am I missing?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Game Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.