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>Batsu (x) is the symbol for incorrect, and can represent false, bad, wrong or attack, while maru (o) means correct, true, good, whole, or something precious. A

>Batsu (x) is the symbol for incorrect, and can represent false, bad, wrong or attack, while maru (o) means correct, true, good, whole, or something precious. Another familiar example of batsu/maru is in the Playstation controller design, where maru and batsu are used for yes and no. Interestingly, ╳ is no/◯ is yes only on Playstation games released in Japan. For games released everywhere else in the world, it's reversed (which I always found odd, since I think of X as a pretty universal symbol for "no"). Previous HN discussion speculating on reasons for the switch here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171430

ralferoo 3y ago
I actually found this pretty confusing myself as the first PlayStation console I had was a PS3 that I bought in Hong Kong that had the Japanese button layout. Some time later, I was using this primarily with Linux under OtherOS and I bought a UK PS3 to play games with. It took me a long time to get used to the swapped buttons. Interestingly, I later became a games developer and discovered that on the developer units you can change the O/X to confirm/cancel mapping in order to be able to test for correct behaviour in both locales, but as a frustrated player who was still getting them mixed up, I never understood why that option wasn't just available on the retail consoles as well. > which I always found odd, since I think of X as a pretty universal symbol for "no" As for this, I think in the UK and maybe most of the English speaking world (and maybe also most other countries), people are conditioned to using an x to mark their selection when confronted with several choices, or a tick mark for true if there's only one choice (sometimes people tick checkboxes, but this usually extends past the edge of the box and can easily get messy) but is seems culturally in Japan they've always used the circle instead. Similarly, using O for off has been a convention on power switches for a long time (again, at least in the UK), so it also makes sense as a cancel button. Conversely, there's also use good precedent for X to indicate wrong in the UK, but I think it's only really when there's a choice between cross and tick. I guess for the original PlayStation, it was always intended that O was confirm and X was cancel, and only got changed for non-Asia when the international Sony offices complained about it being culturally confusing.
m_mueller 3y ago
I'm thinking it has to do with how we use X to fill in choices in a form. And btw. that's a common mistake to make in Japan - never fill in forms with X there, use maru instead.
pavlov 3y ago
The empty circle is a common Western symbol for “off”, as in power switches. It associates with zero == false == no. I suspect this is why Sony swapped the meanings. The meaning of an X symbol isn’t universal even in Europe, but it’s often used to mark a point of interest or active selection (as in ticking boxes, or “X marks the spot”).
- chrisacky 3y ago
  I wonder if this is why Nintendo reversed the meaning of B A on their controllers. I hate that the switch does this. But it means sense if everyone in Japan is used to that behaviour because of the swapping of X and O on Playstation.
  - debugnik 3y ago
    What do you mean reversed? The NES already assigned letters right-to-left: B A! Controllers typically used sets of A-B(-C) X-Y(-Z) face buttons, A/B intuitively meaning ok/back however they were laid out, usually in straight or angled rows assigned left-to-right (e.g. Sega) or right-to-left (e.g. Nintendo). The angled layouts are the modern Xbox and Nintendo layouts (which Nintendo used since forever and Xbox I guess inherited from their Windows CE involvement with Sega). But Sony came up with the symbols instead, so Japanese devs followed the maru/batsu metaphor with circle/X, whereas early western games used X/triangle until they switched to X/circle, and those became official regional layouts until the PS5 switched Japan to X/circle.
    - firen777 3y ago
      This mess of different symbols is why video game should allow users to change the button prompt to their preferred symbol, especially games with QTE.
      - debugnik 3y ago
        I'm fine with different controllers displaying different symbols for the same button, but random-button QTEs and games based around entirely contextual prompts are the bottom of the barrel of gaming. I've seen so many people fail at games by Quantic Dream and Supermassive simply because they were playing with an unfamilar controller. The labels exist to help the game teach its control scheme, not to make players memorise the layout itself. But of course, games without consistent game mechanics don't have any control scheme to teach.
mk_stjames 3y ago
For me, I noticed the 'X' on the Playstation controllers is located right where my right hand thumb naturally wants to come to rest when holding the controller. And, when starting a game and selecting 'Yes' many times in a row to get going (as usually happens at some point when going thru options and menus and setup, etc), it feels natural to just go straight for that button, the X, rather than the O, to me; the O button being just a slight up-and-to-the-right movement from where my thumb is naturally sitting. Now, I never played a lot of Playstation. But maybe my short amount of time playing had already contrived muscle memory for my thumb to hover over 'X' instead of 'O', and I'm swapping the cause of the natural feel. It would be interesting then, if Japanese games all use the 'O' as the yes/confirm/next style button in games, do Japanese gamers have a 'naturally' different thumb resting-hover position when picking up a Playstation controller? If not, I'm surprised Sony did not have the X and O reversed on the earliest design of the controller.
- badtension 3y ago
  > the O button being just a slight up-and-to-the-right movement from where my thumb is naturally sitting. It reminds me of the Yes/No vs. No/Yes debate in the OS UI world. In windows we get Yes on the left and No on the right, which exactly the same as with the PS controller. In Linux this is often reversed and only when you make the change you notice how much you get used to it being one way or the other. I wonder what the order is in Japanese Windows and if it affects Japanese PS controller users at all.
  - plorg 3y ago
    I've never given much thought to this, but I use Windows at work and Linux at home and haven't clocked the difference. At work I mapped the up-and-right thumb button on my mouse to "Enter" and the down-and-left button to "Esc", which I find very convenient specifically for CAD. I got my mouse replaced when the left click button went bad and took the old mouse home and replaced the switch. I set up the same mapping, and I haven't noticed any dissonance. The biggest confusion I notice is scroll-to-zoom, where you have a 50% chance of using up to zoom in down to zoom out and 50% of the other way. I haven't found a good way to guess which applications will do which (on my CAD workstation I have one of two programs set to inverted scroll, and I won't remember which one it is unless I run into a new installation).
debugnik 3y ago
> Interestingly, ╳ is no/◯ is yes only on Playstation games released in Japan. Not anymore as of PS5 though, not sure why they chose to change it.
- delecti 3y ago
  Makes sense. The PS4 came out in 2013/4, and in 2016 Sony restructured their games division, and it's now managed in the US.
  - debugnik 3y ago
    I don't think the team being US-based is enough to explain why did they choose to unify the layout, only why did they unify on the western one.
    - skhr0680 3y ago
      Sony and Nintendo aren’t competing for the same market segments in Japan, so Sony made the PS5 western and exotic.
      - fomine3 3y ago
        Also Xbox is quite unpopular in Japan, so Sony might think that unnatural O/X swap is still fine. It seems to proven true for vs Xbox, but PS5 isn't much beloved.
c-hendricks 3y ago
Related, but I would love to read about the switch in the Western world when we went from Triangle to go back, to Circle. It's probably just due to consistency with the Xbox.
- LinAGKar 3y ago
  And maybe also consistency with the system UI, since the system UI on the PS2 (and maybe PS1, not sure) used circle for back, while PS1 and PS2 games used triangle. On the PS3 you would use the system UI a lot more, so maybe games switched to match.
  - pests 3y ago
    The PS1 system UI (crazy what it had for its time - memory manager for memory cards and a pretty featureful CD player) indeed used O for back.
ecshafer 3y ago
Some old PlayStation 1 games kept the O yes and X no configuration even in the US. final fantasy 7 sticks out especially as a game that kept this control scheme.
- capableweb 3y ago
  I want to remember that Metal Gear Solid also kept the Japanese configuration (in the European version), but I'm not sure how reliable my memories are of the late 90s
  - zerocrates 3y ago
    Metal Gear Solid was like this in America also: X is cancel and O is confirm in the menus.
zerocrates 3y ago
The "original/intended" layout was used a little bit on some Western releases in the early days: Final Fantasy 7 memorably has X as cancel and O as confirm, for example. As others have pointed out, the "flipped" version eventually dominated to the extent that they changed it even in Japan, though maybe you can blame Sony's increasingly Western focus there. Switching it for the West never really made any sense and has only ever led to more confusion than if they hadn't done it at all.
Andrex 3y ago
They changed this with PS5 to use the western configuration, even in Japan. The reactions from Japanese gamers were quite humorous. “At last they’re making it uniform? Japan has been defeated.” “Yep, trash.” “Sony traitors.” “This is a bullshit console.” “This means that the circle on the Japanese flag is now ‘cancel.’” https://kotaku.com/sony-is-changing-the-confirm-and-cancel-buttons-in-japa-1845273030 https://kotaku.com/sony-is-changing-the-confirm-and-cancel-b...
vmladenov 3y ago
I find it amusing that Sony’s “accept” button matches Nintendo’s (A) placement but only in Japan.

ralferoo 3y ago

I actually found this pretty confusing myself as the first PlayStation console I had was a PS3 that I bought in Hong Kong that had the Japanese button layout. Some time later, I was using this primarily with Linux under OtherOS and I bought a UK PS3 to play games with. It took me a long time to get used to the swapped buttons. Interestingly, I later became a games developer and discovered that on the developer units you can change the O/X to confirm/cancel mapping in order to be able to test for correct behaviour in both locales, but as a frustrated player who was still getting them mixed up, I never understood why that option wasn't just available on the retail consoles as well. > which I always found odd, since I think of X as a pretty universal symbol for "no" As for this, I think in the UK and maybe most of the English speaking world (and maybe also most other countries), people are conditioned to using an x to mark their selection when confronted with several choices, or a tick mark for true if there's only one choice (sometimes people tick checkboxes, but this usually extends past the edge of the box and can easily get messy) but is seems culturally in Japan they've always used the circle instead. Similarly, using O for off has been a convention on power switches for a long time (again, at least in the UK), so it also makes sense as a cancel button. Conversely, there's also use good precedent for X to indicate wrong in the UK, but I think it's only really when there's a choice between cross and tick. I guess for the original PlayStation, it was always intended that O was confirm and X was cancel, and only got changed for non-Asia when the international Sony offices complained about it being culturally confusing.

m_mueller 3y ago

I'm thinking it has to do with how we use X to fill in choices in a form. And btw. that's a common mistake to make in Japan - never fill in forms with X there, use maru instead.

pavlov 3y ago

The empty circle is a common Western symbol for “off”, as in power switches. It associates with zero == false == no. I suspect this is why Sony swapped the meanings. The meaning of an X symbol isn’t universal even in Europe, but it’s often used to mark a point of interest or active selection (as in ticking boxes, or “X marks the spot”).

chrisacky 3y ago
I wonder if this is why Nintendo reversed the meaning of B A on their controllers. I hate that the switch does this. But it means sense if everyone in Japan is used to that behaviour because of the swapping of X and O on Playstation.
- debugnik 3y ago
  What do you mean reversed? The NES already assigned letters right-to-left: B A! Controllers typically used sets of A-B(-C) X-Y(-Z) face buttons, A/B intuitively meaning ok/back however they were laid out, usually in straight or angled rows assigned left-to-right (e.g. Sega) or right-to-left (e.g. Nintendo). The angled layouts are the modern Xbox and Nintendo layouts (which Nintendo used since forever and Xbox I guess inherited from their Windows CE involvement with Sega). But Sony came up with the symbols instead, so Japanese devs followed the maru/batsu metaphor with circle/X, whereas early western games used X/triangle until they switched to X/circle, and those became official regional layouts until the PS5 switched Japan to X/circle.
  - firen777 3y ago
    This mess of different symbols is why video game should allow users to change the button prompt to their preferred symbol, especially games with QTE.
    - debugnik 3y ago
      I'm fine with different controllers displaying different symbols for the same button, but random-button QTEs and games based around entirely contextual prompts are the bottom of the barrel of gaming. I've seen so many people fail at games by Quantic Dream and Supermassive simply because they were playing with an unfamilar controller. The labels exist to help the game teach its control scheme, not to make players memorise the layout itself. But of course, games without consistent game mechanics don't have any control scheme to teach.

mk_stjames 3y ago

For me, I noticed the 'X' on the Playstation controllers is located right where my right hand thumb naturally wants to come to rest when holding the controller. And, when starting a game and selecting 'Yes' many times in a row to get going (as usually happens at some point when going thru options and menus and setup, etc), it feels natural to just go straight for that button, the X, rather than the O, to me; the O button being just a slight up-and-to-the-right movement from where my thumb is naturally sitting. Now, I never played a lot of Playstation. But maybe my short amount of time playing had already contrived muscle memory for my thumb to hover over 'X' instead of 'O', and I'm swapping the cause of the natural feel. It would be interesting then, if Japanese games all use the 'O' as the yes/confirm/next style button in games, do Japanese gamers have a 'naturally' different thumb resting-hover position when picking up a Playstation controller? If not, I'm surprised Sony did not have the X and O reversed on the earliest design of the controller.

badtension 3y ago
> the O button being just a slight up-and-to-the-right movement from where my thumb is naturally sitting. It reminds me of the Yes/No vs. No/Yes debate in the OS UI world. In windows we get Yes on the left and No on the right, which exactly the same as with the PS controller. In Linux this is often reversed and only when you make the change you notice how much you get used to it being one way or the other. I wonder what the order is in Japanese Windows and if it affects Japanese PS controller users at all.
- plorg 3y ago
  I've never given much thought to this, but I use Windows at work and Linux at home and haven't clocked the difference. At work I mapped the up-and-right thumb button on my mouse to "Enter" and the down-and-left button to "Esc", which I find very convenient specifically for CAD. I got my mouse replaced when the left click button went bad and took the old mouse home and replaced the switch. I set up the same mapping, and I haven't noticed any dissonance. The biggest confusion I notice is scroll-to-zoom, where you have a 50% chance of using up to zoom in down to zoom out and 50% of the other way. I haven't found a good way to guess which applications will do which (on my CAD workstation I have one of two programs set to inverted scroll, and I won't remember which one it is unless I run into a new installation).

debugnik 3y ago

> Interestingly, ╳ is no/◯ is yes only on Playstation games released in Japan. Not anymore as of PS5 though, not sure why they chose to change it.

delecti 3y ago
Makes sense. The PS4 came out in 2013/4, and in 2016 Sony restructured their games division, and it's now managed in the US.
- debugnik 3y ago
  I don't think the team being US-based is enough to explain why did they choose to unify the layout, only why did they unify on the western one.
  - skhr0680 3y ago
    Sony and Nintendo aren’t competing for the same market segments in Japan, so Sony made the PS5 western and exotic.
    - fomine3 3y ago
      Also Xbox is quite unpopular in Japan, so Sony might think that unnatural O/X swap is still fine. It seems to proven true for vs Xbox, but PS5 isn't much beloved.

c-hendricks 3y ago

Related, but I would love to read about the switch in the Western world when we went from Triangle to go back, to Circle. It's probably just due to consistency with the Xbox.

LinAGKar 3y ago
And maybe also consistency with the system UI, since the system UI on the PS2 (and maybe PS1, not sure) used circle for back, while PS1 and PS2 games used triangle. On the PS3 you would use the system UI a lot more, so maybe games switched to match.
- pests 3y ago
  The PS1 system UI (crazy what it had for its time - memory manager for memory cards and a pretty featureful CD player) indeed used O for back.

ecshafer 3y ago

Some old PlayStation 1 games kept the O yes and X no configuration even in the US. final fantasy 7 sticks out especially as a game that kept this control scheme.

capableweb 3y ago
I want to remember that Metal Gear Solid also kept the Japanese configuration (in the European version), but I'm not sure how reliable my memories are of the late 90s
- zerocrates 3y ago
  Metal Gear Solid was like this in America also: X is cancel and O is confirm in the menus.

zerocrates 3y ago

The "original/intended" layout was used a little bit on some Western releases in the early days: Final Fantasy 7 memorably has X as cancel and O as confirm, for example. As others have pointed out, the "flipped" version eventually dominated to the extent that they changed it even in Japan, though maybe you can blame Sony's increasingly Western focus there. Switching it for the West never really made any sense and has only ever led to more confusion than if they hadn't done it at all.

Andrex 3y ago

They changed this with PS5 to use the western configuration, even in Japan. The reactions from Japanese gamers were quite humorous. “At last they’re making it uniform? Japan has been defeated.” “Yep, trash.” “Sony traitors.” “This is a bullshit console.” “This means that the circle on the Japanese flag is now ‘cancel.’” https://kotaku.com/sony-is-changing-the-confirm-and-cancel-buttons-in-japa-1845273030 https://kotaku.com/sony-is-changing-the-confirm-and-cancel-b...

vmladenov 3y ago

I find it amusing that Sony’s “accept” button matches Nintendo’s (A) placement but only in Japan.