Mythic Dimensions: Digital Technology and Performative Art

 

Recently, I went to go see Peter Jackson and Weda Digital's latest opus The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in theatres. I enjoyed it, which should say something given what it takes to actually drag me *to* a movie theatre, let alone appreciate whatever's onscreen. I'm not going to talk about the movie itself here though: I'm far from a Tolkien fan so I have precious little investment in the plot or characters. Basically I thought it was an entertaining, if clunky and painfully padded, children's fantasy movie frequently weighed down by its desire to canonize itself with the fundamentally tonally incongruous Lord of the Rings trilogy. In other words it's just about a perfect film adaptation of the book.

No, what I primarily wanted to talk about is the other big thing that's been fueling discussion over The Hobbit for the past few months: The fact it was shot entirely in 3D and a “High Frame Rate” 48 frames per second (HFR). This has apparently made a great deal of people very angry, leading critics whose opinions I would otherwise tend to respect to make stupidly sweeping statements about “The Death of Cinema”. I'll deal with this argument a little later on, but for the moment let's focus on why someone would even want to shoot a movie this way in the first place.

For those who might not know, traditional movies are filmed in 24 frames per second. This has been the industry standard for, well, just about as long as there's been an industry. Now, the human eye processes information about the world at 60 frames per second, which means movies, and really any medium that is descended in some way from cinema (such as television, though crucially not typically video games) plays at a significantly slower speed then what we're used to in Real Life. Choosing to shoot a movie at a higher frame rate means filmmakers can by definition convey much more, and much more nuanced, visual information than was previously possible, meaning their movies will look much more naturalistic. Indeed, in a video blog about the choice to shoot the Hobbit trilogy in 3D/HFR, Peter Jackson described the experience, in the words of a pre-release screening group, to be as if the screen at the back of the theatre had been removed and replaced with a window into Middle Earth.

Jackson's comment reminded me of some things Shigeru Miyamoto had said in the past about the Legend of Zelda series. According to Miyamoto, the original Zelda game on the NES was originally built around the idea of a fantasy world inside a desk drawer, which makes a lot of sense if you stop and think about it: Imagine opening up your drawers and looking down at Hyrule and all those tiny little sprites-It's a wonderfully imaginative and very typically Miyamoto way of phrasing ideas. The original Zelda even helped to popularize a top-down perspective for action RPGs. Coincidentally enough, a year prior to the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Nintendo released a handheld console built around the concept of portable, glasses-free 3D video games, and one of the first marquee titles on that system was a 3D conversion of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

In a previous post I've already argued for the use of stereoscopic 3D in video games in strictly technical terms. To briefly summarise my earlier argument, I feel stereoscopic 3D, via the reintroduction of naturalistic depth perception, can help bring back some of our innate ability to orient ourselves in our surroundings that polygonal games lost due to their lack of kinesthesia and fixed, flat perspectives. This would prevent things like the troublesome platforming in Mirror's Edge and the godawful camera in Super Mario 64 (or indeed any other polygonal platformer to come in its wake: Despite a generation of gamers becoming accustomed to it, the problem's never gone away). Here though, I'm arguing from strictly aesthetic ground, because if anything felt like a literal window into a fantasy world it was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D running at full tilt with the 3D slider up all the way. 

 

Ocarina of Time 3D is one of the most visually stunning video games I've ever played and remains possibly the best showcase for the 3DS' kit to date. Hyrule has an unmistakeable depth and weight here, and running out onto the field at dawn as you shield your eyes from the realistic sun rays glinting above the horizon is a powerfully vivid experience that can be described as magical. Like so much about 3D, the beauty of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D comes subtly and in small moments, like sunrise on Hyrule Field or using the built-in gyroscope to aim Link's bow, a trick which really gives the sense the game exists in an actual place that's just on the other side of the 3DS, or perhaps more accurately a place that exists *within* the 3DS. It lives up to Miyamoto's pitch for the series like absolutely no other game in the series has: It truly feels like you're holding the gateway to a fantastic realm in your hands.

Despite how vivid and clever this effect was and how it was clearly designed to hold up the original guiding tenant for the series, you know what *didn't* happen during my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D? I didn't trick myself into thinking I was Link trekking through Hyrule. I never forgot I was playing a video game. Likewise, when I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 3D/HFR I never forgot I was watching a movie. Apparently, if you listen to some critics, this is a major failing on the parts of both works and both Weda Digital and Grezzo should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. Indeed, this even seems to run contrary to Peter Jackson's own statements on the matter. Thing is, the way I see it both Jackson and the film critics are barking up entirely the wrong tree. Since the argument against 3D, and now HFR, is the most fully formed and bandied about the most in film critic circles, Jackson is most likely talking in marketing buzzwords and video game critics seem to mostly be parroting film critics (as opposed to gamers, who seem to be mostly being reactionary and opposed to any sort of change) it's the film critic version of the argument I'll focus on responding to.

Film critics seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis from where I stand. On the one, hand, there is, as always, a push and a desire for things to be as “realistic” as possible, hence the popularity of dark, anti-romantic and “cinematic” filmmaking techniques (see a similar trend in video games as publishers and developers race to improve graphics technology at all costs to make games look as much like movies as possible at the expense of everything else). On the other hand, there is a contingent of cinephiles who seriously argue that movies ought to be watched in a “dreamlike reverie” and only the combination of 35mm film and a 24 frames per second frame rate will achieve this. I guess we're supposed to be completely lost and overwhelmed by the rapturous cinematic spectacle of the director's vision...somehow...and anything else is nothing short of blasphemy. I've never experienced anything remotely resembling what these critics are proselytizing with any movie I've seen, but as someone who doesn't really enjoy movies all that much maybe I'm not the best person to be talking about this subject.

Even so though I find a lot of problems in this argument, especially as it relates to 3D/HFR. There is a belief that 3D is nothing more than a distraction and the enhanced detail of HFR makes everything look unnaturally fast and “hyper-real”. There is a legitimate technical argument to be made against the use of 3D in movies (see this article from the Chicago Sun Times), but this really isn't it and at least for me personally, 3D has done nothing but enhance my enjoyment of anything I've seen it used in in recent years. In regards to HFR though, rebutting this argument requires a great deal of technical explanation and knowledge about how eyes and the visual centre of the brain works. So it's a good thing Tested already did that then as I am neither an engineer nor a cognitive scientist (in brief, those bemoaning HFR's “hyper-realness” are frankly deluding themselves. Even the creator of Adobe Photoshop agrees with me).

As for the “dreamlike reverie” part of the argument, this actually gets at something that's a bit of a touchy subject for me. See, the flip side of this argument is that anything with an enhanced clarity of detail gets a negative reputation for looking “campy” and “theatrical” (say, a TV show), as opposed to being “cinematic” and “realistic” (like an old movie) which is, apparently, better. My good friend and colleague Phil Sandifer has already looked at this argument in the context of the switch from television being shot on film to television being shot on video tape here and here. When put this way then, the big film critic objection to 3D/HFR seems to actually be that the enhanced detail provided by the new digital technology breaks artifice and suspension of disbelief. In other words, it makes the movie look like a movie.

In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, most critics I read yelled and screamed about how HFR made Rivendell look like a Matte painting (which it was), the interior shots look like movie sets (which they were) the lighting look unnaturally harsh (which all movie lights have to be due to the nature of being movie lights) and the prosthetics look like rubber and plastic headpieces (which I shouldn't have to explain). This is apparently a Bad Thing. It's also an argument I simply cannot get behind: The Hobbit doesn't look “hyper-real”, it looks just plain *real*. This is demonstrably and provably what a movie set looks like, period. Putting aside the troubling and I sincerely hope self-evidently false possibility that some film critics don't know what a movie set looks like, this leaves the argument that movies shouldn't look staged because of a need to be “realistic” or, alternatively, to uphold some lofty ideal about the Magic of Cinema™. I've always been opposed to the idea fiction has to be representationalist at all costs. To be blunt I think the fixation on making things look “cinematic” and “realistic” has been one of the most dangerous and distasteful trends in visual media and it irks me more than a little to see things assigned objective value because based on how cleverly they hide the fact they're make believe.

Because this is the thing: Movies and video games, despite what most people seem to want to believe, are not real things. They are facades; storytellers playing pretend. They've never been anything else, and they will never be anything else. Trying to cast them otherwise does nothing except fool people into thinking filmmakers who are being stupidly crass and hegemonic are actually representing reality, thus continuing to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and lead to dangerous assumptions such as thinking the reactionary and truly reprehensible Lincoln is actually a historically accurate biopic or that romantic comedies are an accurate representation of the way relationships and people in general work. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey are not windows into Hyrule or Middle Earth and they were never going to be: They're windows into a crude technological facsimile of what Weda Digital and Grezzo *imagined* those fantasy worlds to be like. Fictional worlds do not exist in and of themselves: They are imaginary spaces made real by the interaction of readers, writers and the works meant to act as representations of them.

Possibly my favourite video game of all time is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. As a series, The Elder Scrolls has the intriguingly paradoxical reputation of being a trailblazer in immersive world building and for pushing the limits of game technology to such an extent each and every game is plagued by an incalculable number of glitches and bugs that range from hilarious to game-breaking and are frequently both at once. One could make the argument Skyrim fails as a work of fiction because the constant technical problems take players out of the game and it's world and keep players from getting “lost” in the dreamlike reverie, but I would sternly disagree: Never once have the glitches in Skyrim caused me to enjoy the game less as a work. Sure, I get upset if it randomly crashes and deletes hours of progress or spontaneously decides to make my save file unusable forcing me to start the whole game again, but I accept that as part of what Skyrim is because it posits a fantasy world that could only exist as a video game. Inexplicably levitating mammoths and farmers falling through the ground are as much a part of the world of Skyrim as dragons, wizards and Blakean Eldritch Abomination Dwarves. Skyrim is a game that embraces being a video game and all that comes with it, and that includes the glitches Skyrim is a game world in every sense of the word, but that's a topic to which we must return at a later date.

I have no problem accepting the fact that my movies and games are actually made by people with technology and imagination instead of Real Places I can escape to that magically come into being out of nothingness. In fact I think that's marvelous, because it just helps me get to know the creators more *as people* rather then aloof Gods. I celebrate the death of artifice instead of bemoan it because, in its dying throws, it reminds us that art, and all art by definition, is performative. Fiction and art cannot represent reality; they can't even be a 100% accurate depiction of any individual creator's vision. At best, all they can do is provide a brief, blurry glimpse into the minds of those who helped usher it into being or strike a chord with individual readersXplayersXaudience members to form an entirely unique kind of meaning.

In a famous and frequently circulated interview (well, comparatively so given the participants) philosopher Avital Ronell, a personal role model of mine, though she'd probably resent that label, flatly rejects the title of “Writer” or “Creator”, preferring instead to call herself a “writing being” or “secretary of the phantom”. For Ronell, writing is not something one, in the manner of a patriarchal God, makes happen and wills into existence. Rather, it can be more accurately described as the act of taking dictation from an incomprehensible ethereal force and trying one's hardest to throw up a facsimile that in some way could be construed as a crude representation or simulacrum of the original set of ideas. One does not “Write”, one is possessed and consumed by “writing”. Ronell compares those who write to drug addicts: Figures imbued with a manner of unreliability and social stigma who nonetheless have a grasp over a unique perspective and insight.

I love this description for a number of reasons: Firstly, as someone who identifies as a similar “writing being”, I can honestly and confidently state this is exactly what writing feels like for at least me personally. Secondly, it's a great argument for the inherent performativity of all forms of personal expression. Indeed, interviewer D. Diane Davis even uses that exact term when referring to Ronell's breakout work The Telephone Book, a piece designed to invoke static noise, contradictory information and the deconstruction and destruction of the book itself as a concept. A play doesn't represent reality and doesn't even try to: Its actors and stage sets are meant to *stand in* for things and situations the audience is familiar with and the real erudition comes from the interaction of all the pieces working together to create a larger, weirder whole. Just as Ronell says, any kind of creative endeavor, be it a book, a movie, a literary text, a journalistic piece, an ethnography, a video game or a blog post, works the same way, no matter how much certain people might wish to pretend otherwise. Personally, I find that a far more fascinating and inspiring concept then the idea our works of art and fiction spring magically fully-formed in the manner of Athena from the skulls of patriarchal Godlike Creators whose Works and Actions must be respected and worshiped in the same manner.

I think of all forms of modern media video games have the biggest potential to emphasize and reinforce this fact, which is part of the reason I'm bothered so much by the language from certain developers and critics that games need to be more “cinematic”. Due to the irreducible factor of player agency, by definition there's no way a video game can force a passive narrative or specific experience onto its audience, despite the efforts of some developers to do exactly that (but that's perhaps another post). Games are fundamentally set up as dynamic interactions between multiple parties at a very overt, literal level, so this performative thread shines through the brightest with them. For a good example of how developers can write this back into the text, let's look at one of the best spokesperson characters for games-as-plays around: Princess Peach Toadstool. Yes, it's once again time to do one of my signature hyper-redemptive readings of a character or text either nobody likes or has nobody has ever heard of.

But how, my indignant readers wail, do I think I can redeem Princess Peach of all gaming characters, the poster child for sexist, stock damsels-in-distress? Well, I respond, it's actually quite simple once you realise what the Super Mario games actually are. The common perception of the Mario games, most famously and succinctly articulated by Yahtzee Croshaw in articles such as this one, is that despite the original Super Mario Bros. (or Super Mario Bros. 3 depending on your preference) being an indisputable classic, it's a tepid and unchanging series that has somehow managed to last over 25 years telling the same basic story and rehashing the same basic game over and over again with absolutely no variation. Also, Peach is reprehensible because all she does is look pretty and get stupidly kidnapped, serves no purpose and lacks any personality or characterization, which would be a valid complaint were any of it actually true. The Mario series' lack of so-called gameplay innovation is one thing and an argument to be examined another day (and one I think might have merit, at least as it pertains to the games of the past decade or so), but Yahtzee's dead wrong when it comes to plot and here's why.

First of all, I'd mention that despite my universal disdain for any kind of kidnapping plot, King Bowser actually had a somewhat acceptable motivation for kidnapping Princess Peach in the first Super Mario Bros. and one most modern critics seem to have forgotten. See, what no-one remembers anymore is that in the story printed in the original manual, it's stated Princess Peach is an extremely powerful sorceress, possibly the most powerful in the entirety of the Mushroom Kingdom, and the *only* one with the power necessary to push back the Koopa invasion force and secure the land. Naturally, Bowser wants to seal her away where she can't do any damage so he can stomp over the Mushroom Kingdom uninhibited. Frankly, Peach is the one who saves the world in that game: You, Mario and Luigi, are just there to give her a hand and clear a path for her. Even if the plot of Super Mario Bros. made sense though, that doesn't explain or excuse all of Bowser's subsequent kidnappings of her, does it? Well, no it *wouldn't*, if he had done it again, as I'm inclined to argue Bowser never kidnapped Peach a second time, and even the first time is debatable.

Shigeru Miyamoto is not a hack writer. I mean I really don't think I should have to state this, but a lot of critical readings of Nintendo games seem to operate with this as an implicit fundamental premise for some reason. Even in the more recent games where he has little-to-no creative input, he still has to sign off on the game and let the developers know they're being somewhat loyal to his original vision. They have to be meeting his expectations to some extent, and unless he's a terrible writer there must be something more going on here. And indeed there is: Look *very* closely at the Super Mario games that came after the original, starting with the US version of Super Mario Bros 2 (A.K.A. Super Mario USA), the next game Miyamoto had a major hand in. The story is, as is well known, meant to be a dream, but the game opens up with a *curtain call* and you select your character by *shining a spotlight* on them. Super Mario Bros. 3 takes this to the logical extreme by not only having the title screen be a big stage with a curtain and props, but the level design itself looks like it's been built by stage hands, as there are conspicuous amounts of bolted-on scenery and scaffolding and Mario and Luigi even “exit, stage right” whenever the level ends. The Super Nintendo games Super Mario WorldXSuper Mario Bros. 4 and Yoshi's Island take a slightly different tack by opening with fairy-tale narration, but the main point is still there: These games are stories being retold via the act of playing them.

Not a spotlight. I think it happens in the SNES version. Still, picture is worth 4.532 words.

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I think it should be obvious what the logical conclusion to all this is: The Super Mario games are plays, and Mario, Luigi, Bowser and yes, Peach, are part of a travelling acting troupe. Peach just happens to be comparatively badly typecast, or maybe it's an attempt to retell the same story many times with subtle variations as a kind of metaphor. This isn't, I hasten to add, solely my interpretation: It's a fan theory gaining significant momentum online (to the point even Cracked mentioned it) and has even been confirmed in a statement from Miyamoto-san himself. This also handily explains the various Mario spinoff games and why Mario and Bowser play tennis and go kart racing together when they're not at opposite ends of a plan for world domination (incidentally, this revelation, paired with the working-class origins of the characters, leads to the intriguing conclusion Miyamoto is likening Mario's acting troupe to William Shakespeare's. Do with that what you will). This reading does seem to hold: If we look at just about any Mario game made since the original five or so, we see that curtains, stages and retelling stories have become fundamental parts of the series, not to mention the infamous fact it's difficult to read the Mario and Donkey Kong from the original Donkey Kong as being the same characters from Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Country and their successors. Obviously they're not: They were playing different roles in a different play at that point.

To return to the main thrust of this post, which was how high-end digital technology like 3D and HFR enhances performativity in media, let's look at the most recent Mario game as of this writing (or at the least the most recent one I've played): Paper Mario: Sticker Star on the 3DS. The case for HFR is fairly straightforward and self-demonstrating in my opinion, something I feel I've sufficiently justified and not as relevant to video games, so we'll talk about 3D here. The Paper Mario spinoff series has always driven home the theatrical production reading harder than other Mario series, and this new game is no exception and clearly delights in having stereoscopic 3D to play with. Mario can move in, on and around various bits of scenery, which can be knocked over, picked up again and rearranged to suit different gameplay needs. Everything looks to be made out of cardboard and a key aspect of the game is remembering that the levels are literally cut-out facades in a three-dimensional world, and the game forces players to keep checking things from all angles to find everything. It feels as if Mario's in a play and improvising on the fly when props and sets don't always do what they're supposed to. While the game's major point could probably be conveyed without it, clearly it's relying on stereoscopic 3D to get it across particularly vividly.

Another 3DS game I've been playing recently, Atlus' Code of Princess, uses a similar approach. It's a cross between an arcade beat-em-up and a JRPG that's wholly aware of the inherent ludicrousness of both genres. The characters are all delightfully self-aware parodies, and even more laudably mostly female, but the most interesting aspect of it from our perspective is the way the battle stages work (and as an aside, note the ubiquity of the term “stage” to describe video game levels). Like in most beat-em-ups, Code of Princess uses a static camera angle that slowly follows the character as she fights her way from left to right. The main innovation here, aside from the aforementioned RPG experience system and genre awareness, is the fact there are three main battlefields on the screen at once, and the characters can leap into the background and foreground at various degrees, which is where the stereoscopic 3D comes in. It's not as overtly theatrical as a Mario game, but the world of Code of Princess definitely feels much more like a stage set thanks to this sort of gameplay (in addition to the general look-and-feel of the game on the whole) than a fully developed fantasy land, and that's to the game's benefit.

Just like a play, these games work by recognising they're inherently performative and gain a lot of their strengths as works by playing off of the audience. Each playthrough of a video game is different, even before you factor in the different styles and tastes of individual players, just as no two performances of the same play, even if it's put on by the same troupe, will be identical. This is abundantly clear here, as it is in all video games, but I maintain a thread of performativity runs through all creative works: We wouldn't have differing interpretations of things if it didn't. So why pretend it isn't there? Why pretend movies, music books or your medium of choice exist in a vacuum separate from human emotion and thought? That's the perhaps uncomfortable truth things like 3D and HFR force media critics to come to terms with. Far from getting us closer to some mythical Truth, all these new technologies will do is remind us of the multiplicity of meaning, and I for one couldn't be happier.  

O Objectivity our subjugator, your legend is lies, lurid and false; your dreamlike reverie a con for the ages.

Why 3D Matters

As technophiles tend to love jumping on the bandwagon of digital progress as soon as possible, it is therefore difficult, and somewhat surprising, to think of a recent tech trend that’s met with as much consumer hostility and revulsion as the late-2000s and early-2010s reemergence of 3D. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, though most likely bolstered by the runaway success of James Cameron’s Avatar in 2009, 3D seems to be cropping up everywhere these days: Most notably in other movies where it’s been sternly rejected, but also in television and video games as well. Perhaps it’s because of the economic depression or because it’s seen as an antiquated technology that didn’t catch on in the past (Remember 3D drive-ins, anyone?) or perhaps because the development in television came so soon after high definition just barely managed to become commonly accepted, but for whatever reason the new 3D is the only recent technological development I can think of to be out-and-out protested and boycotted by the entertainment industry’s bread-and-butter consumer base.

While I can’t speak for movies and television as much as I don’t follow them anywhere near as closely, the addition of stereoscopic 3D to the video game industry has me genuinely excited and I’m actually surprised more people haven’t seen the potential the technology could add to the kinds of experiences only games can provide. While Sony made the tentative inroads by adding 3DTV support to the PlayStation 3, it was really Nintendo’s release and announcement of the 3DS this year that piqued my interest. While other home 3D systems require a complex and cumbersome series of setups as well as the ever-present troublesome 3D glasses, the 3DS’ promise of portable glasses-free 3D is the first legitimately exciting step forward towards gaining the technology a wider install base. However, Nintendo’s constant mishandling of the 3DS since launch has done little to settle down riled consumers and the recent, frankly unprecedented announcement of a drastic $80 price cut means the 3DS and its alleged usefulness are again in the news. As such, I felt now was the opportune moment for me to explain why I think gaming needs 3D and how the 3DS can be that first step into proving why, provided Nintendo plays its cards right.

The primary difference between a 3D movie or a 3D TV show and a 3D video game should be obvious: In a video game, there is an element of player agency. In fact, it should also be fairly obvious that the focus on player agency is the whole point of the video game medium. It’s here where the addition of the 3D technology is going to be felt most strongly: Whereas I would hasten a guess that 3D in a passive medium like movies and TV would be essentially a superfluous and unnecessary luxury and where a lot of the bile probably stems from (I wouldn’t know as I have seen next to nothing from the new wave of 3D in cinemas), in a video game, by contrast, it could actually make a literal world of difference.

In the medium’s pioneering stage games were pretty self-explanatory: Take one look at the single screen of Space Invaders or Pac-Man and it’s immediately clear what the game is about, what the world is like and what the player is being asked to do. Once games started getting a little more complex with the Atari home consoles we got escalation of these simple concepts, like four explorable screens in things like the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie game. The biggest leap forward came in the form of sidecrollers made fashionable by Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. on the groundbreaking Nintendo Entertainment System. Players were expected to play through a huge amount of scrolling, iterating levels to reach a story-centric conclusion that was a design revolution at the time. Sidescrollers became the default template for many games over the next two console generations, but by the mid-1990s technology had generatively evolved (in the proper usage of the term “evolved”) in such a way to allow full polygonal graphics in current consoles. Games like Tomb Raider, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 showed how increasingly lifelike representations of actual virtual worlds could be created with existing game technology. As a result of taking this path, game designers became focused on making bigger and more realistic digital representations, a trend which has continued at least up to this day.

The advent of this type of game brought with it a number of unforeseen problems, however. While present in all such polygonal games, the biggest drawback was most evident in platformers like Super Mario 64: Since Mario was now in a fully 3-Dimensional world where previously he had been limited to a 2D plane; players now had to redefine their concepts of motion in a video game. Moving about in digital space became more akin to moving about in real space, thus adding that extra level of relation. However, video games still lacked two things that actual people in real life have when moving around: Firstly, and most obviously, polygonal graphics based games lack Kinesthesia, the sort of intuitive feeling your body gets when it’s in motion telling it that it’s in motion. Secondly, as such games are essentially 2D approximations of 3D space, players lack the stereoscopic eyesight they would have in real life, meaning playing one of these games is analogous to walking everywhere with one eye closed. These are two very important concepts for maneuvering in 3D space and I think they are far too often taken for granted. While we might not be able to do much about Kinesthesia at this point, we can do something about viewing a 3D game world the way it’s supposed to be viewed and here’s why we must:

The problem with trying to visualize a 3D world from a 2D perspective should actually be pretty obvious: Just like walking around with one eye closed, not seeing a 3D environment in 3D means it looks flattened out and, as a result, near-impossible to judge distances accurately. Here’s an experiment to try at home: Close one eye and keep it closed for awhile-At first it will seem like not much has changed, but that’s only because we’re accustomed to seeing things in 3D so it takes awhile to adjust. Once your eye becomes used to doing double duty, try walking around your house without bumping into things. You should find it’s much more difficult this way because you have zero depth perception. That’s why humans evolved stereoscopic vision in the first place, so we can move about in our environments, find each other and hunt properly without constantly smashing into things. Playing a modern polygonal graphics-based game without 3D technology gives you the exact same problem. This is something movies and TV don't have to think about because the audience isn't expected to actually move the main character around in a pseudo-3D space in those media.

When gamers first got their hands on games like Super Mario 64, they quickly realised that controlling Mario had become far more difficult, not helped by wonky cameras that didn’t always provide the best angle and both of these points were common complaints leveled against Super Mario 64 and its brethren when they first came out. However, as time went by and these games became more common, gamers eventually developed a new visual system for moving about in the game to compensate for this to the point we no longer noticed it. Developers also tinkered with camera systems to make them slightly less cumbersome, with mixed degrees of success. In short, gamers got used to the drawbacks of the new system and game makers fiddled around to help ease the transition. The inherent problem has never gone away, however.

Which brings me to the crux of my argument as to why stereoscopic 3D actually makes a great deal of sense in video games and why, believe it or not, we need it: I daresay many of the 3D dissenters are hardcore gamers in their 20s and 30s who have been playing polygonal graphics games since they first came out. If you grew up on Tomb Raider or Super Mario 64, played any of their innumerable sequels and remakes and followed the industry as this type of game became the de facto standard for all new games in the past three generations, you’re used to all these issues I raised to the point you no longer notice them. However, this does not mean they are no longer there, nor does it mean that whole new groups of gamers just now getting into the medium on the swell of the casual boom of the past six years should be expected to not realise them.

I have a younger sister who I’ve been trying to introduce to the medium. She’s played quite a few games, mostly casual-oriented things and classic 2D platformers. Awhile back I got her a copy of the Nintendo DS remake of Super Mario 64 with a glowing recommendation. She found the game incredibly difficult to visualize and became so frustrated she never got beyond the first level. She’s not the only one: I’ve tried to show some of my favourite games to other people, both young and old, who didn’t grow up with mid-90s gaming and the reaction is the same: To them, the worlds all look “flat” like a “colouring book” and they can’t figure out how to move around in the faux-3D space. This isn’t the way classics should be introduced to the next generation.

Even so-called “core” gamers occasionally run into this problem, though they perhaps do not realise it: In 2008, EA and DiCE released a unique and interesting experiment of a title called Mirror’s Edge. In it, gamers play as a parkour expert named Faith who lives in a dystopian future where entire cites and communication media is heavily monitored. Faith uses her parkour skills to hand-deliver messages to members of an underground resistance seeking to restore freedom to the city. Mirror’s Edge was a visually stunning game with a specialized control system that aimed to be a full-on first-person parkour simulator with one of the most innovative concepts in years. Nevertheless, it was a commercial flop, leaving the future of this exciting new IP in serious jeopardy.

Why did Mirror’s Edge fail? Many reasons have been cited, from poor marketing, thin storylines, awkward controls and confusing platforming where it’s uncertain where you can and can’t jump to. The thing is, from where I stand, almost none of these criticisms are actually particularly valid: Firstly, speaking as a parkour practitioner myself (though admittedly nowhere near as skilled a one as Faith), there is absolutely nothing wrong with the control system used in Mirror’s Edge as far as I'm concerned: DiCE did a great job mapping the various subtle moves to an intuitive system of button combinations. It is, in essence, a parkour sim. True, the level design is not always particularly clear in regards to what you can and can’t leap to, but then again the game relies to some extent on being aware of your own abilities and limitations, much as in real life (the second half of this argument, that the game renders only certain things that are graspable when bits of the background look equally reachable, is a design flaw I’ll concede, however).

Though poor marketing may have played a role in the game’s unpleasant fate, I think the biggest problem gamers had with Mirror’s Edge boils down to something very simple: It’s impossible to judge distances when making precision jumps. As I hope is now clear to my readers, however, this is a problem that is not endemic to Mirror’s Edge because it is the exact same critique leveled at Super Mario 64 nearly a decade prior. This is not a problem that is brand new and just started with Mirror’s Edge, it is a problem we’ve had since the day video games started using polygon graphics to create 2D representations of 3D space. All Mirror’s Edge did is change the perspective from third- to first-person, making the already preexisting problem all the more self-evident.

And herein lays the problem: So long as games with polygon graphics continue to use 2D approximations of 3D worlds instead of true depth-of-field now offered by stereoscopic 3D technology, this problem will continue to persist. Older gamers are used to it, but new gamers aren’t and are more likely now to abandon such games then grit their teeth and bear with it until they get used to it then they would have if they were in our place 15 years ago. The reason for this, quite simply, is the exploding casual game market on smartphones and tablets. Why continue forcing yourself to sit through a confusing polygon-based faux-3D AAA blockbuster when you could just as easily pick up something like Angry Birds which is incredibly simple, intuitive, easy to figure out and addictive? This is a market we didn’t have in the early-to-mid-90s, and new gamers won’t have the patience, or the obligation, to take the time to figure this sort of thing out to stay in the medium.

I recently picked up the 3DS remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game I am intimately familiar with, and was simply blown away by how much easier the true 3D made moving around and how much vaster it made the world of Hyrule seem. The difference between this version and all previous versions I played is so dramatic there's no contest. This is why we need true 3D then, and why I desperately hope the 3DS succeeds. It offers, unlike any other console currently on the market, the potential to finally fully realise the visions designers had almost two decades ago and actually make them playable and accessible to newer fans, not to mention making something like Mirror’s Edge actually click completely. Take notice, Nintendo: You’d be a fool not to contact EA and start talking about a 3DS Mirror’s Edge remake.

Precision platforming is not the only justification of 3D, however: In my opinion, it serves as one pillar of a whole new strategy that could change the way we view and interact with games forever. One other application is this fascinating new 3DTV Sony announced at E3 this year. What it does is broadcast separate 3D feeds tuned to certain goggles, essentially meaning each player will see a different 3D picture: Anyone who grew up, as I did, on split-screen multiplayer should immediately be seeing the practical applications of this technology. There is another, even more important way 3D can help enhance games however, and that’s something I’ll touch on a little later on. I’ll be returning to Zelda and Ocarina of Time in particular in the near future to elaborate. At the moment though, I need to take a little detour to talk about how I think we should read games…

Sources: Destructoid, GamesRadar, Nintendo World Report

Have I convinced you to give 3D gaming a shot? If so, why not check out The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for yourself? I think it's the best example of how stereoscopic 3D can enhance a game right now and if you buy it from that link, I'll get a little money which would be much appreciated. You could also get Mirror's Edge too, if you want to see how important depth perception and kinesthesia are. It's a good game to boot!