“Seemed Like The Way Of The Future”: VR Mk. II and Video Game Narrative

Note: So clearly what I'm talking about here is the Oculus Rift. Equally clearly, I have absolutely no idea that's what it is in this piece and seem under the impression it's of John Carmack's design and not Palmer Lucky's and unaware it's an independent company, which it is. To be fair to me, I was far from the only journalist to make this mistake and the coverage of the Rift at E3 2012 was spotty at best, leading people to make posts like this. I'll leave this up as my larger points on VR are ones I still stand by, despite getting the details of the machine itself pitifully wrong. I hope to have a full review of the Oculus Rift once the consumer version ships, as well as a follow-up on the promise and potential of VR sometime later in the year (2013).

Header video is, of course from The Angry Video Game Nerd, one of my favourite shows ever. If you're in the small minority who still aren't familiar with James Rolfe and Mike Matei and would like to see more from them, please check out their site here.



Well, at this rate my rule about “not covering current events unless particularly relevant” is starting to sound downright farcical...

So E3 2012 was this past week as of this writing. I wasn't physically there thanks to prohibitive travel costs and lack of an official press certification, but I was able to follow the breaking news in real time via a massive amount of streaming content, on-floor video, LiveTweets, instant recaps and my own personal array of spy satellites controlled from the Moon Base where I secretly plot to take over the world. Oh wait, you weren't supposed to know about that last part. Anyway, despite this year's expo being an overwhelmingly tepid and lukewarm affair that showed the industry in a creatively bankrupt holding pattern, there were a few interesting reveals of note. First was Ubisoft's ambitious-sounding new IP Watch Dogs, which I'm sure you'll find is the darling of the games media right now and the talk of the Internet and which hints it might tackle some intriguing, sophisticated and timely themes about the world socio-technoscientific zeitgeist. It certainly deserves a closer examination, and I'll be happy to rise to the challenge when it's actually a thing.

The second, and more important, reveal in my book is one that has baffilingly received very little attention, even on the show floor itself. I find this inconceivable because for me it was the absolute highlight of the entire weeklong expo. Tucked away in a little alcove and separate from the main conference hustle and bustle, John Carmack, whom I've expressed quite a fondness for on this blog before, was demonstrating a side project he's been working on that showed off some truly astonishing technology and potential. With a funky looking pair of goggles literally held together with a duct tape headstrap, Carmack hopes to do no less than bring back that electronic pipedream of the early 1990s, Virtual Reality, and damn well do it properly this time. What's even more unbelievable, if my informants from Los Angeles can be trusted, is that he's actually managed to do it. Describing how he's pulled it off requires some rather muddling digital computer lingo that I don't entirely understand, so let's let the man himself explain in his own words here and here.

What I find so exceptionally laudable about what Carmack says is that, from the way he tells it, this new kind of Virtual Reality system finally does what everyone who was taken in by VR in the 1990s wanted it to do: Fully immerse the player in a realistic-feeling digital world. Even better than that is Carmack's drive to make the materials to build the headset freely available to actual players as a kit that can be purchased for a price that's frankly scarily affordable. This is a conscious, targeted return to the hacker and HAM Radio roots of computer hobbyism that makes up a not-insignificant part of the video game community: A breathtakingly forward-thinking approach to an intellectual tradition that dates back to the Altair 8800 and the BBC Micro. The contrast between Carmack's spirited little demo and the vapid sludge I saw on display at the EA, Sony and Nintendo press conferences was completely night and day. John Carmack is truly the real deal and seems to have the healthy future of both the industry and the medium square in mind. Frankly, where he goes I'll follow.

As excited as I am for the hacker-positive aspects of Carmack's new project and as much as its ramifications and what it reveals about the culture of video game fans deserves careful attention and analysis, what I find most promising about it is what it illustrates about the way video games handle narrative. I had my suspicions before, but this new project has made me certain: John Carmack is not just a whiz kid techie with a bottom-up attitude, he's the first developer since Shigeru Miyamoto to effortlessly grasp what makes video games unique amongst creative media and I'm overjoyed he now works for Bethesda. To explain a little bit more about what I mean and why I'm making this claim, I need to bring up some things Sony showed off at E3 this year.

Sony's press conference was essentially one great big party thrown for the so-called “hardcore gaming crowd” and the loyal PlayStation faithful. It seemed to go over rather well (and it damn well had to given what Sony's fortunes are right now), especially coming off of the sleazy EA show, the fever dream of a Ubisoft presser and the supposedly-disappointing Microsoft showing. I was personally entirely unmoved, but my reasons why are part of a larger attitude I see present in gamer culture and are better saved for another day. One thing both me and my colleagues were in complete agreement of however was that Wonderbook for the PlayStation 3 is an absolutely nonsensical and pointless waste of time. In case you are unfamiliar with the madness that is Wonderbook, allow me to illuminate you: Wonderbook is basically Sony's stab at an Augmented Reality programme where players stand in front of the PlayStation Eye, hold a book-like tablet and wave the PlayStation Move controller over it to make things appear on screen. This was demonstrated by a Harry Potter licensed game where aspiring wizards use the Move controller like a magic wand to turn pages and interact with words to do things like cast spells and trigger minigames. Sony claims this will revolutionize the act of reading and allow books to “transport you to other worlds”.

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that books are already designed to trigger the imagination in their own way and in no way require motion control nor Augmented Reality to do this and the troubling notion that all of the Wonderbook titles seem to be written for kindergartners. What I instead want to focus on is the Sony's notion, very problematic by me, that video games and books somehow need one another. The existence of Wonderbook tells me that Sony thinks books would be improved by slathering on some token rote interactivity and, conversely, that video games are improved by being connected more intimately to books. By implying the mediums are in some way codependent, and logically in some way related, this cheapens them both because in my view books and games couldn't be more different in the way they interact with readers. Books, while dependent to some extent on readers using their imagination to flesh out the look-and-feel of the world, are generally passive media that rely on a linear form of narrative built around character development that is slowly and methodically revealed to the reader. The story has already been told, in other words, and the reader just has to guess how it will turn out. Whereas video games, as I've argued, are designed so players can generatively build the story in tandem with the developers (when they even have a story, which is not even a prerequisite). Given this logic, what is the purpose of Wonderbook? If the book's story is open to player agency, it's not much of a book and if the story is already mostly written the player's role is largely irrelevant. It's a bad game and a bad book all rolled into one: Like one of the potions in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that gives you an error message and disappears when you mix incompatible ingredients, much less than the sum of its parts.

There's a bothersome habit amongst game developers and journalists that, because of the medium's troubled history with moral guardians and its general struggle for legitimacy, to attempt to justify its existence by comparing games to books and movies. If they could somehow show games can tell as good a story and provide as good an experience as the best novels and films, they reckon, this will finally prove video games are a valid and respectable form of art and entertainment. This logic is, simply put, wrong. Video games are most certainly a valid and respectable form of art and entertainment, but not for these reasons at all. When developers operate from this mentality we get calculated misfires like Wonderbook and, more to the point, Quantic Dream.

For those unfamiliar with Quantic Dream, they are a positively vainglorious development studio headed by the unflappable and controversial David Cage who has spent the majority of his career trying to beat Hollywood at its own game. Responsible for such massively-hyped hits as Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, Cage's group has embodied better than any other studio the trend to make “cinematic” games. By hiring A-list actors and jockeying to remain on the cutting-edge of realistic motion capture technology, Quantic Dream consistently aims to provide the most realistic games with the most nuanced and sophisticated narrative. Cage often boasts the stories in his games are as good or better than those of the most dramatic movies and are singularly responsible for proving games are art, an argument that might hold water if any of his games were written well. If my bitterness and apathy hasn't already betrayed my positionality, Cage's is not a viewpoint I am especially fond of and I've found both of his previous efforts to be deeply unpleasant experiences. Both Indigo Prophecy and especially Heavy Rain are built around making decisions at crucial moments to activate different paths on a ludicrously branching narrative. It's definitely interactivity and the player is a crucial component to the game's story to be sure, but not in any meaningful way in my view. Mostly these games play out like really fancy, dolled-up choose-you-own-adventure novels to me and any investment to be gained from them comes from the themes discussed by the characters during the constantly playing narrative which is so carefully-constructed I feel distant from it. It's all the reasons I gave for not liking Mass Effect but taken to the logical limit.

The reason I bring up David Cage and Quantic Dream is because they were another developer to unveil a new project at Sony's E3 conference. Dubbed Beyond: Two Souls (or 3EYOND, I'm actually not sure which), it will apparently chronicle the story of Jodie Holmes, played by Academy Award-nominated actor Ellen Page and deal with Cage's own ruminations on death, mortality and the afterlife. The trailer revealed at E3 had the commendable gonads to be several minutes long, rendered entirely using the in-game engine and show off no interactive gameplay whatsoever to the packed auditorium of veteran games journalists. Never have I seen a finer demonstration of David Cage's opinion of players, interactivity and the basic fundamentals of the video game medium.

Both Wonderbook and Beyond: Two Souls are symptomatic of a big problem the games industry has in my opinion. This constant, insecure pursuit of comparisons to books and movies misses the core value and purpose of video games as a medium which is, as I've argued the ability to effortlessly share experiences and build a shared world through which an infinite number of singular stories can be told. This is something neither books nor movies can do in my view because they are passive media. Without that crucial element of player agency, there's no tangible connection to the fictional world (this is of course not to say one cannot get invested in a book or movie; there's a difference between relating to something and experiencing it). Books and movies are very good at telling stories other people have written and provocative themes can be explored through them both textually and metatextually, but they are at heart still based around linear narratives readers can look at and critique from afar. Video games are something completely different and to conflate the three of them is spectacularly wrongheaded in my opinion. It's like in the Uncharted series, which is designed from the ground up to be like an action movie. Players assume the role of an Indiana Jones analogue and move from setpiece to setpiece and magnificent cinematic cutscene to magnificent cinematic cutscene. Even the mechanics themselves belie the action movie influence: Players do not “die”, they “throw the take” and have to “redo the scene”. Everything about these games gives the impression developer Naughty Dog have a very specific story to tell and if the player deviates from the literal script it makes things inconvenient and annoying for them. Player agency has been compromised in favour of linear narrative, and I don't think there's anything more self-destructive than that for a game. I dread a world where every game is like Heavy Rain or Uncharted.

This brings us back to John Carmack's big idea. Carmack, and his partners at id and Bethesda, understand the importance of agency in a way Sony, Naughty Dog and Quantic Dream don't seem to be able to. It's telling Carmack and id made their name via seminal first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, which were all groundbreaking early steps towards immersing the player in a game world in a way that had never been attempted before, at least not with any real success. The big revelation these games ushered in is right in the name of the genre they helped codify: “First-Person Shooter”. For the first time, there were games that put the player literally in the shoes of their character, making the proverbial link between them and the game even more direct and intuitive. It's difficult to overstate the effect this shift had on the way players interacted with games: No matter how seamless and intimate Super Mario Bros. was, there's truly something to be said for the ability to actually see through the eyes of a character. It simply adds a layer to the experience that hadn't been there before. What id's games did for the first time was change the role of the player from puppeteer to active agent within the game world itself (Miyamoto eventually found a way to change the paradigm here too, but that's another story). Now, with his new experiments with head-mounted VR displays, John Carmack may very well be taking this core concept to the next stage.

If video games are, as I've argued, fundamentally about sharing or creating a generative experience and the point of player agency is to blur the boundaries between the players, developers and game world than a viable first-person perspective is a logical way to facilitate this process. Likewise, competent and effective motion control and well-implemented stereoscopic 3D are further technological ways the medium of games can invoke to make provocative statements (the latter is also important for visualizing 3D space and kinesthesia, as I have of course argued before). Setting the accuracy of the statements aside for the moment, the intimate, pure sense of “I found this” or “I saw this” or “I made this happen” which dates back to at least Super Mario Bros. is integral to the way video games convey themes and I feel Virtual Reality could be the singularity at which technology will finally be able to demonstrate this in its purest form. In my opinion the more streamlined we make interfacing with our games, the easier it will become to connect and resonate with them because it will be easier for us to feel like the experiences onscreen are actually happening to us. This is exactly what Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to evoke through Super Mario Bros. and is the core difference between active and passive media and why trying to shoehorn a linear narrative onto a video game is such a poor choice in my opinion. The way I see it, games like Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Mass Effect series would all be far more evocative and powerful titles if, rather than pausing the game every few seconds to play a lovingly rendered CGI cutscene with professional actors angsting about choices the player has or has not made, players are confronted with those choices and the themes of the work at a visceral, personal level because they have been made to feel an intimate part of the world or narrative.

In the not-too-distant future I'll take a closer look at a game that shows how this alternative can work brilliantly, but for now I want to concentrate on the potential Virtual Reality has to be a perfect fit for this oft-overlooked model of critique and, frankly, revel in the knowledge I live in a world where it can not only exist, but exist in an open, generative, bottom-up form that's true to a pioneering ideal of the medium in a way unlike anything else I've seen in recent memory. There may very well come a time when this too is subsumed by the soulless corporate lowest-common-denominator chasers or misguided hipster artists that have the run of the industry today, but for right now let me bask in the afterglow of an unexpected victory for not only the video game spirit that caused people like me to fall in love with the medium a long time ago, but also the playful underclass that helped light the spark of that ideal in the first place. If this is where one of the medium's leading lights is pushing the medium to go, then I for one am behind him totally and completely and hope he gets all the support and resources he needs. I'd adore for this to be our future and can't wait to see how inspired developers utilize the potential of this new technology to make the most evocative artistic video game works to date. Just this once, I hope a so-called “innovation” lives up to its hype instead of becoming a last-minute cash grab in the dying throws of a generation desperately tossed out by publishers who know they can no longer compete, destined to be abandoned as quickly as they were introduced.

Please, oh please let me be right about this one.

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!