I recently went to the range to go through a pistol training class offered by the NRA. While there I learned that while my right hand is dominant, my left eye is my dominant eye. This means that it's the eye I should aim with to be most accurate. With pistols, it's a matter of cocking your head a little bit and lining up your left eye. With long arms like rifles, however, it's often recommended the shooter fire with their left (weaker) arm instead of their weaker eye. I put a few rounds through a .22 rifle this way and I much liked the left handed position while firing. I talked to a guy there who mentioned that he was cross dominant in the same way and loved shooting rifles left handed, and that while he was on patrol (he didn't mention what kind) he really liked the ability to be looking a different way than the right handed shooters he was with.

Playing Battlefield 3 later on got me thinking, why don't shooting games allow you to shoot left handed? I know Uncharted had a cool feature where you could switch shoulders from behind cover to shoot right or left easier. But games like Halo and Call of Duty, from what I've seen, just switch your control sticks.

I'd like to have the option to have a character that fires pistols right handed and long arms left handed. I like my control sticks where they are, no need to invert them. Firing left handed, however, does bring a different paradigm. In respect to games where we can micro-adjust our sensitivity, there would be a lot of strategy to people who choose to play left handed. I feel like it would be a unique view to bring to shooting games. Certain cover could be fired around more easily. You could more easily cover the right side of a doorway when entering, and when working with somebody you could easily take up two positions and both fire to your strong side.

What do you guys think? Are there any good games that feature this?

In games like COD, the bullets generally appear out of the camera, not the gun, so left vs right handedness wouldn't actually change anything.

Counter-strike was originally left-handed only, in the same way that most games are right-handed only, and later added an option for you to choose. As with COD though, the bullets are shot from the camera, so it's only a visual difference, not a gameplay one.

In more advanced shooter games, like Arma, where the bullets actually do get fired from your barrel, this would make a big impact. Whenever you're hiding behind a tree in Arma, you always want to lean out the right-hand side to fire, so that your body remains maximally covered while still being able to fire. Being able to swap shoulders so you can lean out the left side would be handy, e.g. when leaning around the corner of a building or fence, where you're forced to lean in one particular direction.

Interesting. Battlefield does a good job of covering that up, though given that you can be sprinting one minute and shooting the next with all of you bullets going generally somewhere centered in front of you. I hadn't thought about that before.

To me having your weapon in left hand is weird, and I don't like it. In many games there was (and probably still is) practice that you see mirrored weapons which eject shells at you instead away from you. This was noted as minor negative point for FarCry 2 (Counter Strike didn't probably because people didn't care that much at the time) - for having mirrored weapons and thus ejecting shells the wrong way. Today everyone makes big noise around realism like it is required to be faitfull simulation of the real thing, so if you are to fire weapon that is made for right handed people by default you would most likely get burned from the shell coming out of the barrel. The only thing around having shells been thrown at you like in FarCry 2 or Duke Nukem is to show off your 'cutting edge' graphics engine.

Shells coming out of the barrel on the wrong side won't burn you... many left handed rifle shooters shoot very large rifles made for right handed shooters without too much of a problem. It is different, but you don't have to have a gun necessarily made for left handed people.

Resident Evil 6 let's you switch between them by clicking your right stick.

I totally forgot, and I even own that game. So it seems to be something that is a fixture of the 3rd person adventure games that have an emphasis on platforming. Resident Evil also allows you to jump to your back, roll, and slide, which I found to be pretty cool.

A lot of games let you switch by pressing a thumbstick, but it's temporary and is only meant to help out when you are behind cover and can't use your normal right handed view to shoot because of obstructions.

Something to take into account is that in a lot of games, it would mess with the composition and flow of the screen layout. The end result of any frame is just a 2D image that gets read like any other. Left to right and top to bottom. If there is a HUD element that is least important, it's ofen put in the lower left, and you have to consciously stop, refocus your eye, and look at it.

Here is a very specific example from RE4. And is not meant as a blanket statement in all situations.



That's also why you move to the right to advance in most 2D games.

Examples of this rule at work



This is also used in movie framing. Your eye is meant to travel right through the frame. Characters lean into the right, or the image flows naturally to the right. Characters will back up or seem disinterested by moving left, or looking left etc.

http://webdesign.about.com/od/webdesignbasics/ss/flow-in-design_2.htm

That is a very helpful infographic. I'm not however, suggesting mirroring the image. Your camera would stay the same but instead of having your weapon fixed in the right shoulder, it would be fixed in the left.

I didn't mean to imply mirroring the image, but there is only so much I can do with someone else's screenshot. You would have to move the HUD objects, because it would create ugly clutter when it was layered on top the player, and then you'd get the same layout as my mirrored shot.