i always thought it was people of a certain age who required inversion (i include myself here) because the first 3d games were flight sims, so pulling back on stick/down goes up etc.

Yeah it's not an age thing. My wife does the inverted thing whereas I do the correct way and we're basically the same age.

> do the correct way

Careful, with that attitude you might not have a wife for long.

or friends!

everybody knows inverted is correct anyways.

I've never really played a flight sim, but I can't get my head into non-inverted. Maybe if I spent a dozen hours, I could do it, but why would I?

At least for me, I've always associated preferring mouse inversion with growing up handling BB guns. When you're lifting a rifle up, you are pulling back/contracting on the right arm. When aiming, to go up you nudge the right hand down, or nudge up to point down.

To look down IRL, I move my head forward. Makes sense to me.

I got used to normal look controls with practice but lots of 2005ish console games have inverted controls as defaults. I started a playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on Gamecube to find that is has inverted left/right camera controls as the default. Also, GoldenEye 007 for the N64 has inverted up/down camera controls (if I remember correctly). If you're a certain age, you lived through a time when there was not an accepted default control scheme so console games just picked defaults and moved on. We got used to those defaults. There was a period of time where choice of selection of up/down inversion was seen as a must-have to even play a game (multiplayer split screen) and zero discussion or complaints would arise over 2-3 minutes of everyone (all 4 of us) setting their controls after every console reset. Eventually non-inverted controls became the accepted default. This likely happened during a time that many of us gamed less so we might not have the muscle memory of relearning the new defaults. That's my experience on the whole thing anyway.

I could see this. Like obviously I live first person, and when I want to look up I pull my head back, to look down I push my head forward. Similarly I expect pushing my mouse forward (up) to look down and pulling my mouse back (down) to look up.