Questioning "Unanswerable" Things in Games?

[Maniakkid25]

That's because technically, Japanese does both? If Japanese text is written vertically, it's top-to-bottom, right-to-left in that order, but horizontal text is written left-to-right, top-to-bottom just like English. How do you tell direction? Orientation of the characters. While the direction changes, the orientation does not, meaning they'll always be written in a certain way no matter which direction you are reading it. Japanese is weird

But, in trying to actually find an answer to this question, there are games that do the opposite, but it's possible that this convention is older than video games. There is a lot of speculations, but I've narrowed it down to two culprits: human brains, and coding. Human beings in general show a bias for left-to-right movement, even in right-to-left readers like Hebrew. As such, people naturally gravitated towards left-to-right movement. On the coding aspect, code is read left-to-right, top-to-bottom, no matter what language you are in, so the original programmers might have leveraged this limitation in early games, and the convention stuck.

Also, keep in mind, video games are not a Japanese invention. While we credit them for reviving the video game market in the US, they lived on quite a lot in the European computer market (I will not have ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 erasure here). And even then, video games as we know them arguably started with Pong in the US. Admittedly, side-scrollers were a Japanese invention (the first one I can find is by Sega, though I'm willing to be Williams' Defender was way more popular), but you could argue that video games as we know them are an American invention (or, if you're a real hipster, British). So it's not like the Japanese made all the gaming conventions we know of wholesale; there is a fuzzier history.

Or maybe its because Super Mario Bros. did it, so everyone tried to copy that. Stupider things have happened.

[ShiraNoMai]

It's interesting when you also consider that the standard gamepad layout is read in the right to left format (A button on the right, B to the left). It's why Nintendo's gamepad layout is the way it is, and why Xbox, an American company, reworked the format to a left-to-right orientation.

I definitely think it's a historical precedent in place like you mentioned, Maniak. I imagine it wasn't even video games that did it, but likely how scrolling works in terms of computation/processing and *that* stems from the study you published on the left-to-right movement bias.

So the answer is: yes.