darthbator

Why right?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiePaAHK3jE

 

So recently I've been thinking a good deal about physical character orientation in games (probably cause I've been making lots of stuff rotate recently). As my thoughts often do when I start thinking about gaming things I started thinking back to all the games I played during my childhood. It's hardly a new realization to anyone (or thankfully to myself) that almost all of these older platformers moved from left to right. It's so ingrained that it's a common practice to hide collectibles in a location that requires the character to scroll the screen left. I've even heard some developers talk about using leftward motion in platformers to convey a sense of "unease" or transition. They say the desire to continually move right is so ingrained that making the player scroll left for a good length of time is noticeable if just on a subconcious level. It makes sense. There's lots of reinforcement for that. Even in reading we always move from left to right here in the west. Wait... Most of the games I am thinking about from my youth where Japanese... In Japan they read top to bottom right to left....

 

Is there some western precedent set during the Atari era that just stuck? I'm amazed we haven't seen more people try 2D platformers dominated by left scrolling stages. I actually can't think of a level/scene based platformer (not something in the adventure vein) that defaults to right to left scrolling. The only games I can recall that have long left scrolling segments are rooted in the idea of transversing a larger map (even in something like castlevania 4 where the stages attempted to represent the larger castle map). Why do you think this is?

 

I noticed this sort of "right bias" transfers into almost any 2D game I play. It we're playing street fighter I want to be P1. Pushing left to go forward just doesn't feel as "correct" the joystick maneuvers don't feel the same. It's probably not enough for anyone else to notice a decrease in my ability to play, but it's something I certainly feel. Anyone else happen to have a similar right side bias? Do you think it's caused by lots of Genesis-NES-SNES era platformers? 

 

Slightly off topic.I thought that particular video was the trailer for a kickstarted documentary about 2D platformers. However there's really no information on the video's youtube page and I was not able to find the kickstarter. Does anyone here happen to remember what that was (or if  happen to be nuts). 

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That video was awesome, how annoying that the few games I don't recognise look amazing and I desperately want to play them now :)

I was going to mention fighting games until I hit your third para. I think a lot of it comes down to familiarity, when I was obsessed with street fighter 4 multiplayer, hitting quick match would throw you into someone else's lobby, so you'd always be player 2, and sometime during the 100s of hours I stopped minding the right side. It became something I didn't even think about. But I've been there, many a times I've desperately tried to jump over Sagat to get back on the player1 side and got a tiger uppercut for my troubles.

I think jet set willy had you going left and right in equal amounts. Ha! The first room actually makes you go left, maybe that was by design as the game was meant to be 'whacky'. Or maybe it was just before the 'rule of left' of set

Although it is more of an adventure style game then an out and out platformer

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Isn't it the same way with films? If you're going to represent a journey on screen character movement is typically shown from left to right. 

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It's way less ingrained in film language than video game language but yeah,

, while moving right to left can be used
. I actually learned a lot about that sort of thing recently when I watched a bunch of Buster Keaton movies. His films (especially his shorts) tend to have an incredible focus on establishing large spaces and telling a story by the way the main character physically traverses that space. His films often pull the camera way back to emphasize that space, and the result often looks like a side-scroller.
(though maybe the super racist scene where the black family is all "g-g-g-ghost!" should be omitted).

 

I imagine it's just easier to keep making games that go left to right. Once it became standard, a developer would have to have a pretty good reason to confuse their audience by asking them to go right to left. Similar to how higher pitched sound effects like chimes and bells mean good things in many games (points in Donkey Kong, coins in Mario). Once an audience accepts it as part of game grammar you have to accept it, whether that means you just go with it or you decide to subvert it.

 

Especially in those later platformers of the 16-bit era that had a lot more exploration and verticality. Just knowing that goal = right makes exploring a maze-like platforming level a lot easier.

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I was fortunate enough to watch that video before it was blocked in Canada, and I really wish I could see it again.

 

 

I seem to recall once hearing that American players had a much harder time starting the original Metroid than Japanese players did, and Nintendo's tips hotline got a lot of calls from players who hadn't found the morph ball yet. IIRC, the reason why the morph ball was put to the left in the first place was specifically as a way to teach players that they could go left.

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I seem to recall once hearing that American players had a much harder time starting the original Metroid than Japanese players did, and Nintendo's tips hotline got a lot of calls from players who hadn't found the morph ball yet. IIRC, the reason why the morph ball was put to the left in the first place was specifically as a way to teach players that they could go left.

 

American players were probably just confused because they were playing as a female so they couldn't play the game as their typical male power fantasy.

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Wonderful, that video is blocked in my country because of copyright claims.

Have you tried watching it via some proxy (e.g. Proxfree, Hide My Ass)? I have to use those a lot, half the music in 'The Dancing Thumb' is blocked in my silly country for example.

 

grrrrrr

!

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I was fortunate enough to watch that video before it was blocked in Canada, and I really wish I could see it again.

Oh, i've actually seen it before. It's just, prompted by Mington, i just wanted to see how many games i could identify, because i recall having recognized most of them. (At the very least, the screen capture on the embed is Assault Suits Valken/Cybernator.)

 

I seem to recall once hearing that American players had a much harder time starting the original Metroid than Japanese players did, and Nintendo's tips hotline got a lot of calls from players who hadn't found the morph ball yet. IIRC, the reason why the morph ball was put to the left in the first place was specifically as a way to teach players that they could go left.

That's a great anecdote, i love that.

It's because our written language reads from left to right.

Probably.

Except many of these games are japanese, where the opposite is true.

Though i suppose the very, very earliest games to establish the convention were american. (Pitfall!)

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Just guessing here:

1. As Nachimir pointed out, English reads from left-to-right

2. Screen coordinates go from the top-left to the bottom-right

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This totally made me think of a scene from a recent episode of Breaking Bad - big spoilers:

just before Walt shoots Mike, there's a shot of him walking left to right back to his car, offscreen. He gets the gun, and then you see him angrily walk back right to left to shoot Mike. For me I've just realised it felt physically uncomfortable watching him walk that way in such a direct side-on shot

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Someone should perform an experiment where kids of various ages are asked to draw a car moving forward, in order to see what percentage of them draws the car going from left to right and whether this choice starts to dominate only after a certain age. Actually, I'd be very surprised if an experiment like this hadn't been carried out already.

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Yeah but in Japan they read right to left and they have had a major hand in making us go right, although I don't think they type code right to left... or do they?

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The only game I can think of that has the player predominantly moving left is The Mushroom Engine, and that's because it's a platformer you play backwards chronologically (in the same way Retro/Grade is a backwards shmup).

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That video included Prince of Persia, which does not have a right-bias. You start going right, but pretty soon you have to turn left, get the sword and go back right. In the second level you mostly go left, and in the third one as well. I don't remember the 4th and 5th level very well, but I think one of them had you mostly going right, and 6th is going left, and then the 7th is going right and then back left. And the 8th as well -- right, back left. And after that I don't remember much, but when you face the Vizier in the end he is to your left. And so on. It would be interesting to know whether going left or right in that game in specific places was intentional or just happened.

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Japanese isn't a mirror image of English, though. If I understand correctly, written Japanese is either top-to-bottom and then right-to-left (this is like English if you rotate the page 90º clockwise), or left-to-right and then top-to-bottom (like English).

 

So if you were drawing a correlation between writing direction and video game direction, you'd expect English-language games to go left to right, Japanese games to go top-to-bottom, and Arabic games to go right-to-left.

 

Well, and here's what Wikipedia says:

Historically, vertical writing was the standard system, and horizontal writing was only used where a sign had to fit in a constrained space, such as over the gate of a temple or the signboard of a shop. This horizontal writing is in fact a special case of vertical writing in which each column contains just one character.

Therefore, before the end of World War II in Japan, those signs were read right to left.

Today, the left-to-right direction is dominant in all three languages for horizontal writing: this is due partly to the influence of English, and partly to the increased use of computerized typesetting and word processing software, most of which does not directly support right-to-left layout of East Asian languages.

 

If we can trust Wikipedia on these points, I'd say that even Japanese developers can have an bias toward left-to-right movement based on their writing system.

 

It'd be interesting to find out whether the metaphors of rightward and leftward motion for progression and regression in film bear out in the cinema of these other countries...

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I was going to say a similar thing with regard to Metroid, because I did not play the original Metroid until long after I'd beaten Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion and moving left is just as natural as moving right. In Super Metroid, the first motion on Zebes (?) is left. It's the only way you can get to the tunnel network.

 

For the more open-world Castlevania games this is mostly true as well, although you do generally start with the castle to your right.

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That was kind of the big motivation for me really writing this post. Realizing most of my rightward scrolling experiences where from japanese developers where they do not have that enforced in their reading/writing etc. However lots of really good points as to why that might be have come up in this thread. The precedence of games like pitfall. Right handed dominance, and the fact that most Japanese developers probably coded in a "western" oriented language (although I don't think that plays to quite the same level IMO). 

 

What about SHMUPS? Those kind of shrug the idea that reading direction enforces directional scrolling. One would think JP SHMUPS would move downward but I can't think of a single vertically oriented SHMUP that is not presented with the craft "ascending" to the top of the screen. I don't know if I can rightfully recall playing any kind of SHMUP that scroll from R->L either.... 

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If it was just to do with the direction we read and write -- then do other culture's games would go from right to left...?

Well, except other cultures didn't really start making games until the standard of left-to-right was set in place...

 

INTERESTING OBSERVATION! The Commander Keen series has a bunch of levels that go every-which-way, including right-to-left and top-to-bottom. (Bottom-to-top is less interesting, because that's par for the course in vertical levels/games.)

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I've been looking (not hard) to see if anyone has ever asked anyone why they chose to make those particular shifts in orientation in those classic games (like keen and Prince of Persia). I actually don't remember PoP very well but I do remember 2 shadow flame pretty clearly. I remember that game feeling explorative in a metroidvania kind of way. However it was still based in levels right? I always remember finding those games super hard, but really loving the sword combat.... Memories! <3

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