Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces
ROMchip Journal vol. 7 no. 1 includes a rare treat - a development essay by a Japanese developer that has been translated into English.
Author Hiromasa Iwasaki started in the game industry back at Hudson Soft in 1988 working on games for the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16 here in the US). He served as director on the Turbo CD game Ys I & II (1989) and the Bomberman series game Atomic Punk (1990) for Game Boy, along with many other games that were never localized into English.
Lately, Iwasaki has been participating writing for dōjinshi publications, which are similar to amateur press publications. Dōjin circles are groups of creators who tend to publish together, usually around a particular theme or fandom, similar to amateur press associations. Japan's copyright laws make it easier for fans to create their own derviative small-press works based on popular characters from video games, comics, and animation and sell them in small quantities at dōjinshi conventions like Comiket (short for Comic Market). Most dōjin works are magazines and novels, but there is also a fair number of computer games (dōjin soft), board games, and card games as well.
On a side note, on my other blog, I have been researching about how some amateur dōjin circles became professional game design studios for board game and RPG publishers during the simulation game boom in Japan in the early 1980s. You can read about the Keio HQ Simulation Game Club in my translation discussion of Star Trek: The Invasion of Klingon Empire. You can also read the bio I wrote about Atsutoshi Okada, founder of the THQ dōjin circle and one of the most prolific simulation game designers of the era.
Legend Volume 7
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Legend Volume 7 cover image (illustration by Hiroshi Aizawa) |
Iwasaki has been writing for the Legend series of dōjin books. Volume 7 (shown above) features Iwasaki's essay about how and why early 2D games tend to have characters that move to the right, notably in "side-scrolling" games such as Moon Patrol and many others. This deals with the concept of Frame Mobility, how the screen appears to move (or not move) to show the player different parts of the gameworld.
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Moon Patrol (1982, Irem) |
Legend Volume 7 was available through booth.pm, a global dōjin marketplace, but is currently sold out. It was also sold through Comiket and other dōjinshi outlets in Japan, but is nearly impossible to access from the US... until now!
Why Do 2D Games Usually Go to the Right?
My main interest is in his essay on early 2-D "side-scrolling" games and their tendency to have characters that appear to move toward the right side of the screen. The conventional wisdom is that this is a cultural norm for the English-speaking world. We read from left to right, therefore it feels natural to move from left to right. Others claim that the convention comes from old Western films, where the heroic gunfighter is shown on the left side of the screen so that his right hand is visible. Others claim that arcade game layouts often had a joystick on the left, therefore it was natural to start the player character on the left side of the screen. Still others claim it is a hard-wired part of our brain that left-to-right movement feels more "natural." Other claim that Super Mario Bros. did it, therefore it became standard. These arguments are echoed on The Escapist, Reddit, StackExchange, Resetera, and a study by Dr. Peter Walker of Lancaster University.Let's Standardize Terminology
Recently, I’ve had a few opportunities to talk about the history and technical aspects of games with university professors and graduate students, and I realized that if we don’t standardize terminology from the beginning, it can lead to confusion.
Here is an example of induced movement that I use with my students. In the image above, we see the brave aviator Porco Rosso flying through the air in his seaplane. The plane is gently bobbing up and down and we see some secondary motion as the engine vibrates and Porco Rosso's scarf blows in the breeze. However, he doesn't seem to be going anywhere. There is no sense of motion and the aircraft feels static.
The addition of moving clouds provides induced movement to the aircraft. The stationary object appears to move right to left, in the opposite direction as the moving objects in the background. The plane is still smack in the middle of the image, but our brains read it as flying through the sky. This is the same way that side-scrolling games work.
Side-Scrolling Games
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Star Blazer (1982, Broderbund) |
Iwasaki quickly moves away from video arcade games with their powerful custom hardware and expensive price tags. Instead, he looks at how side-scrolling games were created on personal computers in the early 1980s. These computers needed to be general purpose, programmable, and affordable in the home and could not match the graphics seen in some arcade game hits. These would include games like Tony Suzuki's Star Blazer (see above), a Scramble-like left scrolling shooter that I put a lot of time into on my school's Apple ][ during lunch breaks. Your ship seems to speed left to right across a landscape filled with vital targets to destroy as enemy aircraft move right to left to attack.
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"General Screen Coordinate System of a 2D Game Machine" image from the article |
One issue that Iwasaki cites is the standard coordinate system used for placing sprites on the screen (interestingly, he has an aside about how Atari invented sprites, then called "motion objects," for Tank 8 and Sprint 2. According to Iwasaki, it was Texas Instruments that coined the term "sprite" when developing the TI-99 computer). As seen in Iwasaki's image above, the coordinates start at (0,0) in the upper left hand corner. The sprites also use this same coordinate system, where the (0,0) point on the sprite is in the upper left corner of the image.
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