I'm currently doing a kind of training project in Unity (still a beginner). It's supposed to be somewhat like Breakout, but instead of just going left and right I want the paddle to circle around the center point. This is all fine and dandy, but the problem I have is: how do you control this with a keyboard or gamepad? For touch and mouse control I could work around the problem by letting the paddle follow the cursor/finger, but with the other control methods I'm a bit stumped.

With a keyboard for example, I could either make it so that the Left arrow always moves the paddle clockwise (it starts at the bottom of the circle), or I could link it to the actual direction - meaning that if the paddle is at the bottom, it goes left and up along the circle or, if it's in the upper hemisphere, it moves left and down, both times toward the outer left point of the circle.

Both feel kind of weird. With the first one, it can be counter intuitive to press Left to move the paddle right when it's in the upper area, while in the second method you'd need to constantly switch buttons to keep moving.

So, long story short: is there any kind of existing standard, convention or accepted example for this type of movement and the corresponding controls? I didn't really know what to google for (control conventions for circular movement was one of the searches I tried, but it didn't give me much), and I also didn't really find anything about this on here. If there is a Question that I simply didn't see, please excuse the duplicate.