Having all gauges nominally pointing straight up when things are "normal" is an airplane thing. That way when you do your scan of the instruments you don't have to read each one. Especially when you have multiple engines and a lot of "steam gauges". That's what they call the old analog circular gauges. Newer instrumentation is all going electronic on displays so you can present information in a lot of other, different formats like graphs, blinking lights, colors, etc. The other thing done is to use color in the gauges so you can quickly see at a glance if it is green (OK) or red (not so OK) or yellow. They also use tick marks for specific action points.
David Teitelbaum