Every now and then I come across a game that uses RIGHT click to select actions in the game’s opening menus. An example of this is a game I’m playing tonight called S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. The norm in games and computing in general (at least I’ve always thought) would be to LEFT click to select menu items.
This isn’t really a big problem or anything I’m just wondering as a point of trivia if there is a reason why some developers do this. The games I’ve encountered that are this way have all been European-made but that might just be a coincidence. Is there a reason why some Europeans would be used to right clicking where in the US we normally left click?
because they want to …
there does not needfully have to be a reason.
I remember back the days when RTS used left click to issue commands and the first 1-2 games stormed out to use right click for it …
There was a lot of backfire about that but as you see its mainly a matter of getting used to (it solved the problem of left click having more than one primary function)
The problem I see with using right click for menues in games is the fact that selecting in the web and on both major home user OS is done through left clicking, so a right click menu isn’t that approachable, as you mentioned.
On the other hand, using right click for menu allows you to have the left click functionality remain active in overlay menus for example, which in a shooter is pretty important.
It’s useful and left mouse click cannot be done, because in most games, left click activates the first option of the menu and right click shows a gui with all possible options.
For example if you are in combat and you want to attack opponent quickly, you will not want to right click him and then click attack, you will just click him once and it will activate the first option from menu which is attack for e.g… But if you wanted, say follow the same player, you right click him and choose follow which is second or third option etc.
Yes, my question was about the menus and config screens and things where the other button is not used, so there would be no design conflict.
Even within the actual gameplay though it’s still puzzling why they would choose to do it this way because they could simply invert the left and right buttons overall and it would play closer to normal (or at least the way that would seem “normal” to the vast majority of players I think). When I encounter one of these “backwards” games I do this myself by switching left and right in my mouse driver and then it usually feels fine.
What I was wondering was maybe in some parts of the world is there a cultural preference for having left and right clicking the other way around from the more typical way?