Why do games always go from Left to Right?

[Hawkeye21]

Because by going right, you are going in the right direction.

 

[Xariat]

While I found the programming reason really interesting my answer would be the psychological one. When looking at a 2D (or 3D) screen we almost always associate going from left to right as going forward and right to left as backwards. this is true for animation and video games and even pictures. We get a greater sense of progress when going right, and when we do come across a level that goes left it feels weird and almost uncanny.

why is it like this? I don't know, and I'm not qualified to take an educated guess. In my mind that's just the way we are.

 

[Alfador_VII]

While I found the programming reason really interesting my answer would be the psychological one. When looking at a 2D (or 3D) screen we almost always associate going from left to right as going forward and right to left as backwards. this is true for animation and video games and even pictures. We get a greater sense of progress when going right, and when we do come across a level that goes left it feels weird and almost uncanny.

why is it like this? I don't know, and I'm not qualified to take an educated guess. In my mind that's just the way we are.

I used to agree with this viewpoint also, until I realised that manga is read from right to left, which would imply there's some sort of psychological disconnect between static pictures on a page, and moving pictures on a screen, for Japanese gamers.

Personally I agree about left-scrolling levels feeling weird, and it's not too rare to hide secrets to the left of the starting point of a level. Very few of us even think of looking in that direction!

 

[SpAc3man]

Commander Keen 4 has a few sections where you go right to left. Including the first level which really threw me off the first time I played it.

 

[moggett88]

as Japanese text, and manga is read from right to left

Japanese text runs left to right too, its only the panels in manga that go the other way.

Hebrew is right to left, should have said that...

 

[Jacques Joseph]

Lot of interesting stuff here. Never thought of the programming implications, especially why it would be advantageous to put the (0;0) coordinates in the top left corner.

there are lots of reasons but I think one is just about the thumb.

the d-pad is on the left side.. moving your thumb to the right is an extension, moving your thumb to the left is a retraction.

might be a crazy thought but it's one I have occasionally, especially when playing fighting games.. a lot of moves are easier to do on one side or the other because of how the thumb works.

This is also very interesting and might be one of the reasons, I´d think.

As for the psychological reasons, in euro-american culture, it definitely goes very deep. Partly maybe because it is the direction in which we write, but ever since the Romans the right side was always considered "right" (...see?), whereas the left one was the wrong side (latin for left is "sinister" - see what it means in English?). Even in other European languages you get these parallels. Christianity also developed this a lot, e.g. in allegories whenever there is a crossroad the road to the right is always the righteous one, the road that goes to the left leads to the Devil.

For Japan, I´m no expert but I think that it may be a bit trickier because they basically have two ways how to write, the traditional one that would be right to left but is more exactly *from the top down with only lines going from right to left* but also a modern one where lines go from the top down and when they do, the text on the line always goes from left to right. Cultures that are 100% right to left would be Jews and Arabs that go right to left with lines going from the top down. Given the prevalence of left-to-right games, I doubt theirs would go in the opposite direction but it is interesting to notice that advertisement that shows pictures "before" and "after" (the use of the product or whatever) show the "before" on the right side and the "after" on the left side in countries that speak Arabic which really means that their "natural way" to look at things would be this direction. In Japan, I think they put the "before" on the left, though...

 

[Strazdas]

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.

while the japanese may not read from left to right that does not mean people dont do that in general.
normally when a person is looknig around usually he will look from left-up to right-down. some peopel do it differently, but majority does it like that. its jsut how naturally we evolved, sort of liek most peopel are right-handed and some left-handed without an actual realistic benefit to either.

There are plenty of 2d platformers where you go all ways actually.

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.

Oh i so hate that.
Y is down - and up + and everything that requires me to do it backwards must be invented to torture me

 

[direkiller]

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?

It's because most people are right handed and it's easyer to push something that direction with your right hand. So it kept people playing longer on quarter eaters.

Even on a mouse it is a natural thing to do. Just play a RTS, what direction do you drag select units?(top left to bottom right,siply because it feels comfortable).

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

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.

Incorrect! In the NES game Abaddox you actually have whole levels where you fly DOWN.

The more you know *shooting star*

 

[Alfador_VII]

Incorrect! In the NES game Abaddox you actually have whole levels where you fly DOWN.

The more you know *shooting star*

Indeed. Well ok, sometimes down is possible as well as up. And we've seen some sections where right to left is done, but I mean in nearly all cases it's right or up. Exceptions are good though

 

[Nomadiac]

Maybe because the vast majority of us use left-to-right writing systems. We read left to right, and I think think left-to-right as well, and I'd assume most other people would be broadly similar. Perhaps platformers would be different if they were developed by a native Arabic or Hebrew speaker with no prior knowledge of game conventions, seeing as they write from right to left.