Why do games always go from Left to Right?

[Alfador_VII]

This mainly applies to 2D games, but regardless of genre, they primarily scroll from left to right.

Yes, sometimes you have to backtrack for a while, but I can't think of any exceptions to this, other than ones that go up or down of course

You'd expect Japanese games to scroll the other way, as Japanese text, and manga is read from right to left, but even those games go left to right.

Anyone got any bright idea why this is?

 

[Weaver]

I do partially think the way we read text is something to consider. However, I also think how graphics canvases work in graphics programming has something to do with it as well.

Basically, to make a character go towards the right would involve adding to their position, going left would subtract.

Now, doing addition is not really more difficult than doing subtraction, however there are some considerations.
1) There is a psychological compulsion that "going forward is a +", at least there is to me.

2) The less negative numbers there are the less chance you have of needing to deal with negatives.

3) Back in the day, doing subtraction was probably more difficult than one might think. The NES, for instance, required that the programmers manually manipulate the memory registers on the machine. Doing an ADDITION in this case, is safer than a subtraction. All you need to do is add the speed and then add the position, and store it in the proper register. The ORDER you do it doesn't matter. However if you mix up subtracting the speed from the position and the position from the speed, you get a wrong number.

However, in all most of these games you can, of course, go left; but something to keep in mind is that the top of the screen is ALWAYS position (0,0). In the first mario, they likely didn't want to deal with the negative number issue and simply NEVER let you move backwards (once the screen moved past a point in Mario 1, that was it).

Likely in the future, once this was more of a solved problem, they probably decided to keep right as the primary direction for the sake that players were just used to it.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I always thought it was just because we read from left to right but I guess that doesn't hold up too well if a Japanese company produced the first batch of popular 2D side scrollers since they read from right to left.

There was a level in Comic Jumper where you get thrown into a manga and you actually move from right to left instead of the usual left to right because that's how you read manga. The rest of the game is your standard left to right. I thought it was pretty damn cool at least.

 

[Alfador_VII]

Most of the maths cut for brevity.

Back in the day, doing subtraction was probably more difficult than one might think. The NES, for instance, required that the programmers manually manipulate the memory registers on the machine. Doing an ADDITION in this case, is safer than a subtraction. All you need to do is add the speed and then add the position, and store it in the proper register. The ORDER you do it doesn't matter. However if you mix up subtracting the speed from the position and the position from the speed, you get a wrong number.

However, in all most of these games you can, of course, go left; but something to keep in mind is that the top of the screen is ALWAYS position (0,0). In the first mario, they likely didn't want to deal with the negative number issue and simply NEVER let you move backwards (once the screen moved past a point in Mario 1, that was it).

Likely in the future, once this was more of a solved problem, they probably decided to keep right as the primary direction for the sake that players were just used to it.

Yeah I hadn't thought of the programming implications, that really does make sense, I think you may have a winner there!

Vertical scrolling games are different, regardless of programming, because trying to fly a ship continually down the screen would feel so awkward! Hence, those always go up.

 

[NightmareExpress]

There's a psychological reason for it.
Going to the right (horizontal) is perceived as advancing, as is going upwards (vertical).
Hence why a vast majority of charts depicting progress or growth are shown travelling to the right and upwards.
Or could it be that the traditional nature of charts has led to that widespread perception? Bah, either way it would be rather weird for the normal mind to think of going left and/or down as moving forward.

I recall hearing about this phenomenon in regards to animation and how left-right movement cycles feel "more natural and forwards moving" to viewers.

The technical side of things has already been explained quite nicely (for the retro instances).

 

[Cheeseman Muncher]

Because the elitist handarchy dictated that the left is evil and bad, to move to the right is the one true course. (I refuse to confirm or deny that I may be left handed.)

But yeah, I remember hearing about AC10's numerical explanation before. Makes sense that they code it in the most efficient way at the time. It's probably not so much a big deal now, but I'm guessing it sticks around in modern 2D platformers because the way everyone remembers it being.

 

[kailus13]

Because Mario was and everyone wanted to copy Mario. This resulted in ever 2D platfromer going from left to right so it seems like the natural course of order.

 

[rob_simple]

Because the elitist handarchy dictated that the left is evil and bad, to move to the right is the one true course. (I refuse to confirm or deny that I may be left handed.)

How did you get out of your cage, lefty?

OT: The programming explanation was really interesting, but psychologically I definitely think there's something in it as well.

I read a lot of mangas as well as regular comics (ladies, please, restrain yourselves! I'm trying to type) and the right to left thing never bothers me then, but there's something conceptually weird about going right to left in a video game.

Or maybe it's just because it's all I've ever known: I remember the first time I played one of the boulder run levels in Crash Bandicoot I thought my mind was going to melt.

 

[Cloudydays]

I do partially think the way we read text is something to consider. However, I also think how graphics canvases work in graphics programming has something to do with it as well.

Basically, to make a character go towards the right would involve adding to their position, going left would subtract.

Now, doing addition is not really more difficult than doing subtraction, however there are some considerations.
1) There is a psychological compulsion that "going forward is a +", at least there is to me.

2) The less negative numbers there are the less chance you have of needing to deal with negatives.

3) Back in the day, doing subtraction was probably more difficult than one might think. The NES, for instance, required that the programmers manually manipulate the memory registers on the machine. Doing an ADDITION in this case, is safer than a subtraction. All you need to do is add the speed and then add the position, and store it in the proper register. The ORDER you do it doesn't matter. However if you mix up subtracting the speed from the position and the position from the speed, you get a wrong number.

However, in all most of these games you can, of course, go left; but something to keep in mind is that the top of the screen is ALWAYS position (0,0). In the first mario, they likely didn't want to deal with the negative number issue and simply NEVER let you move backwards (once the screen moved past a point in Mario 1, that was it).

Likely in the future, once this was more of a solved problem, they probably decided to keep right as the primary direction for the sake that players were just used to it.

I'll basically agree with this. When programming games, it's much easier to keep track if you're going from a small number to a larger.

 

[DuelLadyS]

For those who want to see an exception to the rule: the best known game to buck this trend is the original Pitfall. While you can go in both directions, the game is much easier if you opt to run to the left.

 

[KelDG]

It is time for everyone to look on their CD player / Tape player / DVD player / Sky or Cable device and look which way the play arrow points.

(The whole left to right thing is completely arbitrary, and is just what we are used to. Think about it if we flip the graph in the second post, positive to negative would be the other way round. You can do this in any direction. No negatives would be involved. Also applies to text.)

TLDR ; Its just what we are used to. AND WE DON'T LIKE CHANGE, PEOPLE DIE OVER CHANGE

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I do partially think the way we read text is something to consider. However, I also think how graphics canvases work in graphics programming has something to do with it as well.

Basically, to make a character go towards the right would involve adding to their position, going left would subtract.

Now, doing addition is not really more difficult than doing subtraction, however there are some considerations.
1) There is a psychological compulsion that "going forward is a +", at least there is to me.

2) The less negative numbers there are the less chance you have of needing to deal with negatives.

3) Back in the day, doing subtraction was probably more difficult than one might think. The NES, for instance, required that the programmers manually manipulate the memory registers on the machine. Doing an ADDITION in this case, is safer than a subtraction. All you need to do is add the speed and then add the position, and store it in the proper register. The ORDER you do it doesn't matter. However if you mix up subtracting the speed from the position and the position from the speed, you get a wrong number.

However, in all most of these games you can, of course, go left; but something to keep in mind is that the top of the screen is ALWAYS position (0,0). In the first mario, they likely didn't want to deal with the negative number issue and simply NEVER let you move backwards (once the screen moved past a point in Mario 1, that was it).

Likely in the future, once this was more of a solved problem, they probably decided to keep right as the primary direction for the sake that players were just used to it.

This is an incredibly insightful post. Thank you, I've always wondered about this.

 

[Jayben Tibbles]

This applies to more than just games, look at depictions in Westerns, Medieval Jousting and other cases of Good vs Evil, this is a lot deeper and a lot older than programming. It's not fully understood, but google "protagonist movement left to right" and the first link to come up has some interesting points (unfortunately I can't link to my old media studies books)

 

[Sherokain]

Not the main reason probably but it ties into it, during theatrical performances and movies the good guys always enter from the left and move to the right hand side of the screen same as bad guys entering from the right. it was a short hand for telling who was bad and who was good and may have kind of carried over into the games industry in the early days, from then on it was just convention really.

 

[lacktheknack]

I always figured it was because it's how we read.

But then I realized that the famous sidescrollers were made in Japan, where they read from right to left...

...so I don't know. I'll go with the programming explanation.

 

[NSGrendel]

I do partially think the way we read text is something to consider. However, I also think how graphics canvases work in graphics programming has something to do with it as well.

Basically, to make a character go towards the right would involve adding to their position, going left would subtract.

Now, doing addition is not really more difficult than doing subtraction, however there are some considerations.
1) There is a psychological compulsion that "going forward is a +", at least there is to me.

2) The less negative numbers there are the less chance you have of needing to deal with negatives.

3) Back in the day, doing subtraction was probably more difficult than one might think. The NES, for instance, required that the programmers manually manipulate the memory registers on the machine. Doing an ADDITION in this case, is safer than a subtraction. All you need to do is add the speed and then add the position, and store it in the proper register. The ORDER you do it doesn't matter. However if you mix up subtracting the speed from the position and the position from the speed, you get a wrong number.

However, in all most of these games you can, of course, go left; but something to keep in mind is that the top of the screen is ALWAYS position (0,0). In the first mario, they likely didn't want to deal with the negative number issue and simply NEVER let you move backwards (once the screen moved past a point in Mario 1, that was it).

Likely in the future, once this was more of a solved problem, they probably decided to keep right as the primary direction for the sake that players were just used to it.

Quoted for awesome. Thank you for providing a clear and succinct answer to people not familiar with programmatic organisation or gaming.

 

[BrotherRool]

-snip-

So why can't you have graphic canvases that start in the top right corner and go down to the bottom left?


(I'm also curious why Japanese numberlines go left to right =D (they do, I checked on wikipedia). It's not a natural concept, if you don't teach it to people then people don't think of it in the same way. I guess because decartes was French?)

 

[Weaver]

-snip-

So why can't you have graphic canvases that start in the top right corner and go down to the bottom left?


(I'm also curious why Japanese numberlines go left to right =D (they do, I checked on wikipedia). It's not a natural concept, if you don't teach it to people then people don't think of it in the same way. I guess because decartes was French?)

It's a great question, mainly because (0,0) with the Y axis going down being a + isn't really the standard representation of the Cartesian plane (down Y is negative usually), which is incredibly counter-intuitive and it was a weird concept to wrap my head around when I first started with graphics programming.

I have two hypotheses as to how the top left being the origin (0,0) came to be. Keep in mind, these are guesses.

The first thing to note, the NES was famed for being an 8 bit system. Indeed, 256 horizontal pixels by 240 vertical pixes was the consoles display output. You'll conveniently note that 256 is the maximum amount a byte (8 bits) can represent.

The byes, as thus, had to be what is called an unsigned byte. That is, it CANNOT be negative; a signed byte, in contrast, represents 256 values; but these also include negative values. Thus it goes from -127 to 128 (includes 0).
An unsigned byte does 0 to 255.

Thus, with only this to work with, picking the corner as an origin makes sense if you want to simply use unsigned bytes in your console. Doing so eliminates negative numbers in your coordinate representation, which is always nice as discussed previously

Now, the tricky part; with four corners, why the top left with the bottom left is such a more natural fit, mathematically?

I'm not honestly sure, but part of my guess is that CRT monitors and televisions were the primary displays of old. These displays drew from left to right, and from top to bottom. I've heard rumors of old time programmers drawing their next frame "behind the scan line" or some such so that it would look more fluid. The level of hardware intimacy the old console programmers had was admirable (to me anyways) and almost a little bit scary.

Anyways, these are all just hypotheses
Also, in modern graphics you CAN basically setup your coordinate system any which way you want; but in the end, the monitor at the OS level still has the very top left set to (0,0). There is a whole system about model coordinates, world coordinates and screen coordinates that... well, takes some explaining and is a bit complicated. Also I've been drinking so yeah