I'm not familiar with the game, but it sounds like if you actually have to move the mouse pointer "around" the player character, that the game is making use of both the x and y axis to do that.
Not that it would be impossible with just a single axis, but that would take some pretty good math skills to do and even then I'm not sure because you'd need to know the current player position, since the x axis of a spinner could only be used to "move" the mouse circularly around that point.