In terms of sheer numbers, inverters vs. non-inverters is the biggest schism in the games community. Whenever the subject comes up, it always leads to some petty argument about how you tilt your head when you look around in real life vs. "No, up means up, you loser, your head is not a tiny aeroplane."

Look, maybe my head is a tiny aeroplane, and my brain is the pilot. And that's before we get to the fact that inverters are at a massive disadvantage in these matters because “invert” rhymes with “pervert”.

For one of these groups, it is merely a fact of life: whether nature or nurture, to those of us afflicted with the scourge of invertism – a stigma I have lived with for most of my life – pushing forward on a stick to look down comes just as naturally as walking or breathing.

There’s a lot of misconceptions about inverters, perpetuated by people on either side of the divide. That people who invert are outliers, that it’s some kind of "skill issue", that it doesn’t make sense to invert Y if you aren’t also going to invert X. That it’s easy to switch with a bit of practice. That it all depends on what your first game system was. But, according to researchers Jennifer Corbett and Jaap Munneke, who surveyed a big sample of gamers and subjected them to cognitive 3D spatial awareness testing, whether or not you played flight simulators as a child has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on your Y-axis praxis.

Though this study has gone some way to disproving these commonly held myths, it stops short of providing any real answers about why some people invert, and why others do not. Largely, I suspect, because that’s rather like trying to explain the briefs or boxers divide. There’s an unknowable number of factors to consider re: why someone would have a preference, and it doesn’t matter anyway because… well, it’s just underwear. It only matters to the individual concerned. It’s not like one day they’re going to stop making boxers.

Except, as the study sort of says if you actually read it, it’s not just a personal preference. Well, it is, but it’s one that’s massively dictated by how your brain happens to be wired and how it handles spatial awareness. Although with practice and perseverance, some people have found that they can unlearn their default and switch over - usually this is from inverting to not inverting - it’s kind of half-way between a personal preference and an accessibility issue. It’s a bit of both. And understanding it may well be crucial for important things beyond the realm of gaming, such as telesurgery or drone operation. All kinds of applications where the operator’s spatial awareness is being distorted by a non-standard field of view, the lack of a third dimension, input lag, frame drops, and more besides.

I dunno. I’m guessing. I’m not trying to get a research grant, so I’m not that invested in whether or not that’s a convincing pitch for how serious this issue is. What’s incredible about the study’s findings is that, and I’m quoting the researchers from an article in The Guardian here, “None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted”. So, all of us are barking down the wrong tree, and it actually has more to do with how you process 3D space at a deep cognitive level.

This absolutely tracks with my own, limited, tiny sample size research. I took a poll of IGN Entertainment staff recently and found that, firstly, of the 35 people who responded to my survey, only seven of us are inverters. And of those seven, beyond the inverting, there wasn’t a single unifying factor apart from the fact that we’re all over 30. But most people at the company are over 30, so that hardly feels like a significant marker.

I asked people to check which control scheme or device they first used, and it was a mix of control pad and joystick. Interestingly, no inverters mentioned mouse and keyboard, which may be significant: very few people seem to invert when using mouse look, which makes sense. I don’t, despite being a hard-wired inverter when it comes to anything with a stick. Essentially your crosshair just becomes a mouse pointer when you’re in the middle of a gunfight.

Some non-inverters did say that they sometimes invert for vehicle controls. But Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson said anyone who inverts in FPS games is a pervert. It’s just a big mixture of anecdotes and scant few unifying factors in either group. The one thing that seems to make you more likely to invert is age – whether or not you’re old enough to have been an active gamer in the late '90s or early 2000s, and that certainly makes a lot of sense because that would roughly cover the heyday of the PS2 and Nintendo 64 which, as noted by some of my colleagues, had a lot of popular games where the camera was inverted by default. As IGN’s deputy guides editor Casey DeFreitas writes:

"I played way too many hours of both The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Pokemon Snap on the Nintendo 64, and both of those games REQUIRED inverted vertical controls! You couldn't change it. I got used to it and then when I tried games that were default non-inverted, my aim was awful. I refuse to publish gameplay of mine if I can't invert the controls and have to aim, it looks like a baby grabbed the controller."

Lots of really big games from that time – huge, genre-defining games – shipped with inverted look. Goldeneye 007, another N64 classic and a pioneering first person shooter on consoles, had an inverted camera. GTA 3, the original PS2 release, notoriously came configured for inverted look without any way to change it. And people just had to deal with it because otherwise there’d be no GTA for them.

Many would count Timesplitters on the PS2 as their first encounter with modern twin stick controls, and this shipped with inverted Y by default without any way to change it, forcing a lot of people to just get on with it. Now, I think that’s an important part of the story here: the fact that back in the day, configuration options in console games, being able to tailor an experience to your own preferences and brain wiring, simply wasn’t a thing you could rely on. Most of the time you just had to accept whatever the developers shipped it with.

There was also no general consensus as to how 3D controls should work on a gamepad. It was the wild West. Conventions we take for granted now – left stick for movement and strafing, right stick for looking and turning – simply hadn’t been established, and it’s a bit difficult to pin down exactly when they were because these things tend to change slowly, like an abandoned chocolate bar melting on a dashboard.

Timesplitters certainly didn’t invent the modern control scheme – other console FPSes had it as an option years before it. Even Goldeneye 007 had a twin stick mode utilising two of the N64’s ridiculous controllers. Alien Resurrection on the PS1 had it, and interestingly copped a lot of flak from critics at the time who considered it unwieldy and unplayably difficult.

See, like all major technological and cultural innovations, it turns out a lot of people were stumbling around in the ball park of what became the accepted solution. Many people credit Halo: Combat Evolved with popularising the very concept of First Person Shooters on console (not inventing, but perfecting it), with its innovative sticky aiming that made the twin stick controls we still use today feel good and natural in the hands. And also pioneering the ingenious, diegetic method of determining the player’s inversion preference via the use of a tutorial that instructs you to look at specific lights and then simply asking you if the way the camera moved felt right or not, automatically inverting the controls if it didn't. It meant that both types of gamers were catered for in the most natural way possible. The rest is history.

Halo eliminating any configuration friction and simply working in whichever way was natural for the individual player probably went a long way toward establishing non-inverted camera controls as society’s default. Instinctively, for the majority of people, many playing these games for the first time in their formative years, up means up. This intuitive piece of Halo’s tutorial wasn’t just a cute way of bypassing menus, it was solving an accessibility problem that was widespread at the time because there were no standards, no hard conventions, about how these things were expected to work... largely because gaming is an industry where a bunch of nerds and computer science poindexters are making entertainment products for normal people who own Sony Bravia TVs and sleep in a big bed with their partner.

In the years since, platform holders have mandated the option of inverting Y alongside other toggles, and it’s basically not an issue any more unless you enjoy arguing about stupid shit with strangers on the internet. I can’t remember being negatively affected by my invertism since Beyond Good and Evil HD came out about 400,000 years ago. In fact, with every new generation, it becomes more of a standard practice to cater for as many preferences, impairments, or even disabilities as possible, with many huge mainstream games now including extensive options for fine-tuning everything from camera controls to high-contrast overlays for the severely colourblind.

I suspect it’s more or less impossible to determine exactly why some people invert and some people don’t. What I do know is that inverting is wildly misunderstood by non inverters, while the reverse isn’t the case at all. I’m not remotely confused as to why Up means Up. On paper, that’s perfectly intuitive. Up means down, patently, is not. And in microcosm, it’s a perfect, low-key example of why diversity matters in game development: you can’t just cater to what is considered “normal”, otherwise you risk alienating huge swathes of your potential audience. And that’s a hard, dispassionate business case for just having some consideration for people who aren’t necessarily the default character in life.

In the business, we call that subtext.

Last week, after years of hopeful speculation, Sony's Santa Monica Studio announced it will be remaking the original God of War trilogy. T.C. Carson, the original voice actor behind Kratos, stepped in front of the camera to reveal that the project is in the “very early” stages of development, and that we’ll have to wait a little longer for any of our questions to be answered. And there are a lot of questions.

Will this be a graphical facelift à la Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls, or are we revisiting Greece with the Norse duology's controls and overhauled game design? If the latter, will Kratos have a companion accompanying him to Pandora’s Temple and the Isle of Fates? Will there be a blacksmith NPC popping up in expected places to provide armor and weapon upgrades? Will we be able to jump and fly, like in the original games? And what about those sex minigames?

That last one almost sounds like a joke, but fans who’ve brought them up seem to be deadly serious. “You better not edit out Aphrodite,” one of the top comments on the announcement video posted to the official PlayStation YouTube channel warns, referring to the particularly graphic minigame from God of War 3. “Do not censor original material,” reads one of the – as of the time I’m writing this article – 256 replies to that comment. “Dont ruin it.”

Fan fixation with these minigames makes sense, and not just because of the franchise’s initial target demographic. They are, for better or worse, as much a part of the Greek saga as the Blades of Chaos, appearing in every mainline title except for Ascension. Even the two handheld games, Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta, have their own versions of them: one in Attica, while fighting off the Persians, the other at a brothel back in Sparta.

They’re also a product of their time, one when both gamers and game developers were overwhelmingly male, little if any thought was given to the way women were represented, and hack and slashers generally relished in all things lewd and bloody and pubescent. But times have since changed, and changed profoundly at that. Once taken for granted, today the minigames stand out like a sore thumb. They are perhaps the only aspect of the Greek saga I could envision its developers regret adding in, and hence it’s unclear whether they will return alongside the togas, sandals, and cyclopes.

Personally, I’d be surprised if they did. Santa Monica Studio seemed to have soured on the minigames as early as 2013, when the team working on Ascension decided not to include one – maybe in response to backlash, maybe out of post-orgasm clarity after visiting Aphrodite. In that game, Kratos’ obligatory trip to the bordello plays out in a cutscene, and the women there turn out to be an illusion created by one of the Furies.

At the same time – and, please, hear me out here – I do think there’s a place for them in the Greek games, at least in concept. More than a crude joke, I always found that they contributed to the saga’s story and themes. In the first God of War, the sex minigame – like that part where you burn the caged soldier to progress through Pandora’s Temple, or condemn the ship captain to his death after taking his key – adds a welcome sense of moral ambiguity. It demonstrates that Kratos is not a conventional hero, and suggests there’s more to his quest to kill Aries than the desire to avenge his family. If visions of his dear, dead wife haunt him so, how could he lie with other women? At least, that’s what went through my head when I encountered the minigame for the first time.

Both God of War 2 and the trilogy’s final entry make clear what the first game only insinuated: that Kratos’ vengeance is not a crusade for justice, but an excuse to kill and destroy for the sake of killing and destroying. In both games, the minigames help convey his downward spiral into sadism and nihilism. In God of War 3, for example, you enter Aphrodite’s chambers right after killing her husband, Hephaestus; a tragic, ultimately well-intentioned character who, up until this point, acted as your only ally, Athena and her ulterior motives notwithstanding. At every turn, the developers stress that Kratos cares for nothing except the gratification of his own, basest desires. At this point, lust and bloodshed are the only things he lives for, and that won’t change until he meets Faye and fathers Atreus.

The horniness of the Greek saga also feels somewhat appropriate when considering its source material. The ancient myths woven into Kratos’ world are full of sex, as is the Greco-Roman visual culture that inspired Santa Monica Studio’s talented concept artists. The goddess of love and beauty is not the only one with her nipples out: Kratos, Zeus, Hades – everyone, man and monster, is bare-legged and bare-chested, their bodily features every bit as sculpted as the marble statues at the MET.

Most importantly, perhaps, the minigames help bring home the Greek games’ meta-commentary – a commentary present throughout the trilogy but most pronounced in its concluding chapter, where Kratos is at his ugliest, meanest, and most pathetic, and the franchise’s cinematic endorphin rushes pivot from tasteful indulgence into nauseating overindulgence. Where impaling Aries was uncomplicatedly epic and triumphant, Kratos’ actions in God of War 3 hit differently. Brutalizing Poseidon’s and Hercules’ faces, ripping off Hades’ mask, cutting off Hermes’ legs, snapping Hera’s neck, beating Zeus until the screen becomes completely covered in blood – each “victory” leaves the player feeling a little uneasy, ashamed, hollow. Boss battles in the first God of War and its sequel made you feel like David taking down big, mean Goliath; no matter how brutal the finishing moves, your opponents had it coming. In God of War 3, you’re more like a playground bully, kicking another student when they’re down.

The minigame with Aphrodite also veers into garish over-indulgence, but to a slightly different effect. Instead of making you feel like a bully, you just feel like an idiot. I certainly did when, playing with a childhood friend, we just sat next to each other in awkward silence, going through the motions to get all the red orbs while keeping an ear out for my mom walking up and down the hallway. Very manly indeed.

Some might think that the Norse games walked back on the Greek saga’s abundance of sex and nudity because the gaming industry decided to chase inclusivity, and Barlog and his team tried to stay on the good side of a culture that considered the minigames offensive and misogynistic. This is not the case. First and foremost, the Norse saga walked back on these things because they play no part in this leg of Kratos’ story. Once again, his wife has died. But this time, he channels his grief into something more constructive: rather than destroying the world, he tries to be a better parent to his son.

For the remakes to succeed, they have to communicate – as effectively, if not more effectively, than the original trilogy – how Kratos ends up at the personal low-point from which the Norse games set off. If the sex minigames are in any way included, this is the purpose they should serve. If they’re removed on account of being tasteless – not unthinkable, as that was kind of their point – no matter. Surely, Santa Monica Studio can think of other, more respectful ways to convey Kratos’ downward spiral, and for players to go down that spiral along with him.

Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.