People usually think about only one side of things when they are asked: "What is innovation in games?". Miyamoto, Kojima, Molyneux and Wright might be key innovators in the gameplay development field, but even then they are restricted to the software side. There’s another side to this story, the hardware side. And this side has one person in particular who can be seen as the "avatar" of innovation on the technical hardware side. This person is James Cameron, and he has some things to say about turning cinema into 3D as well as pushing that change into television and gaming.



A shift to 3D gaming would be a giant leap forward, so let's try to gain some perspective from the past and present before we try to imagine what the future may hold.

The ghost of gaming past
It's no secret that gaming originated in 2D. In an 1980's era of arcades and later 8bit consoles, 3D was something that people tried to do, but what usually had to achieve by using visual tricks in 2D. It wasn't until the 1990’s that true 3D became a reality. Sure we’ve had Battlezone in the 80’s and Wolfenstein 3D/Doom in the early 90's, but even they lacked something that made them give you the feeling you were actually in the game. Not until Quake arrived, did we really know what we missed. Being able to walk around a virtual environment and looking up and down at will.. it was amazing. And it didn't even look like Virtua Racing!

As graphic chips became better and cheaper, consoles made the jump to 3D as well. With the PSX and N64 making better and better looking games, the focus was shifted into making beautiful 3D games that could be marketed as "lifelike!". Gone were the days of 2D platformers and beat'em ups, destined to be forgotten until they became retro again, just like your mother’s teenage clothes.

Things moved on at an increasingly fast pace. We got the DC which gave us Sonic in 3D as well as a ton of great 2D shmups, and it failed. We got the PS2 and Xbox which showed that the Gamecube lacked 3D power, encouraging graphics whores worldwide to enter the fanboy domain. Still, that generation was basically the same as the one before it. Things were a bit shinier, there was more animation and better interaction could be achieved, but it was still basically the same stuff as before with a nicer look. We still played them on the same tv's, with the same controllers and wasted the same 60+ hours on the same Final Fantasy game whether it was FF7 or FF10.

The ghost of gaming present
Now we've entered the HD era of consoles. PC gamers can scoff at the concept, since we/they've played games at HD resolutions for 10 years now. Just like pc gamers in the 90's were able to bash each other's head in with resolution fapfests, console gamers can now do the same thing. Where it used to be: "You play at 800x600? Lol noob! Play it on 1600x1200 as it is supposed to be played!" is now "Lawl ur game is only 576p, ur console r teh sux0rz". And the arguments still don’t make any sense because the games always play the same.

HD gaming has had some other effects, which are worth mentioning in short. First of all: old 3D games now look like shit. Sure there are a couple of exceptions, but generally it just looks like crap compared to what they looked like when we first saw them, 8 years ago. But old 2D games still look relatively "good". Although it can be a matter of taste, 2D schmups from 2-4 generations back still look pretty good on current age TV's. Galaga does not, neither does Xevious, so screw those games. But other games like 1942, Xenon 2, Ikaruga, still look good enough to be playable without making you cringe at jaggies and low polygon counts. True, HD versions would look better. But it would not necessarily make them better games. The future of 2D games is still wide open, especially with games like Odin Sphere showing what you can do with 2D on a relatively powerful machine. 2D will always be 2D, but it will become more fluid, prettier and generally devs will be trying to reach the pinnacle of 2D gaming at some point.

Second: HD gaming drives HDTV sales. I’m gonna take the easy road here and include Blu-ray under gaming. According to one study by Magid & Associates, "approximately 18% of HDTV sales between September 2007 and January 2008 were largely made by consumers looking to improve their gaming experience". Especially in Europe you can see this phenomenon, where people buy an HDTV for digital TV football matches during a World Cup or where they buy it after they have bought their console. HDTV is only widespread in television broadcasting in countries like the US, Canada and Japan. The rest of the world is either lacking in HD content, or they don’t have enough money to buy rice. While at the same time, they do want to play games worldwide in HD.

Third: HD is pretty much the first big change in watching television since the color TV. Yet it took about 20 years to become economically viable and even now it’s still not that widespread. Some markets get cheap HDTV's and get to watch a Lost airing in 720p. Other markets have to be content with more expensive HDTV's, have to download that same Lost ep and watch it in the same resolution, only later. Markets are slowly changing in technology as well as geographical location. And although 720p is kind of the norm right now, 1080p is what console makers want their developers to aim for. And even 1080p is shit compared to upcoming generations of TVs that give you 3820x2160 resolutions.



It’s nice to have sharper TV’s, but just like how the PSX and PS2 generations did not differ that much in games and gameplay, neither will 2160p and 1080p TV's differ that much. Sure it looks good, but that won’t change an experience in itself. In fact, for movies, studies have shown that the video quality doesn’t even have a large effect on the total viewing experience. Ask yourself: have you ever watched a shitty cam or telesync version of a movie that still ran in the cinema? And did you watch it on dvd or in the cinema later? Did you really experience the movie in a different way, other than seeing more detail and special effects?

If you watched Transformers, then perhaps yes. Not just because that movie is a HD fapfest in itself, but mostly because there was no story to miss or to care about. If you did the same with No Country For Old Men, you probably wouldn’t really notice a difference in hindsight; you might have watched a shitty copy first, but that doesn't stop you from viewing a story and making mental representations of that story in your mind, storing it to memory. Maybe you’ll enjoy it more in HD, but the increase in the movie viewing experience (positive or negative) generally tends to be lower than you’d expect. Whether you watch Citizen Kane on a 14" CRT monitor or on a bigass plasma TV: it’s still Citizen Kane.

The same thing holds true for gaming. Sure HD looks nice, but it doesn’t really add much. Unless the game is almost unplayable in SD, like Dead Rising’s unreadable text or Burnout Paradise's unreadable radar. HD in itself doesn’t really add another layer of experience. This is where 3D comes in.

The ghost of gaming future
If you are unaware of who James Cameron is, go watch Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2 and yes, even Titanic. Those last 3 movies especially, were examples of technical brilliance during times where Hollywood was just getting used to the idea of having special effects of a past generation’s kind. There would probably have been no Stargate or SG-1 without The Abyss' water ripple graphics. Just like Terminator 2 wowed us as kids (if you are oldfag enough) with the T-1000. For years, games tried to achieve "Terminator 2 graphics" to the point of having graphics cards launch with T2-like demo’s. Finally, Titanic might have sucked when you got dragged to watch it with your gf for 3 hours. But the movie itself was excellent in the technical department. It might not have looked that impressive, but that is exactly what made it so impressive: it looked like it fit perfectly and it looked realistic enough to be believable.

So if Cameron is such a technical innovator and genius, what the hell has he been doing the last 10 years? Well, he has made a 3D camera, that’s what (click here if you want to know how it works). Maybe you recall those underwater documentaries he worked on, in all likelihood you don't. Long story short, he made a digital camera with 2 lenses so that he can record things in 3D. At the same time, he can see what is being recorded on a display on the camera, and choose to add CGI in it. So basically, he can see the end result before it's even shot. This is a major departure from the old ways of shooting film, developing it and then doing the rest in post-production.

Currently, he is working on two 3D movies: Battle Angel and Avatar, which are supposed to hit in 2009. Both will be epic scifi action adventures and both will become trilogies if they are successful, in the Matrix/Pirates of the Caribbean style of shooting parts 2&3 at the same time. We've been able to hear how amazing the movies are going to look for a while now. But as if that wasn't enough, Cameron is now talking about moving the 3D into the realm of games and television.

Now, this might sound gimmicky, but (in my opinion at least) it's actually the start of the next big thing to happen to TV since HDTV. Look, we all want holodecks in our houses when we get old and before we get too old to move around without a diaper. Most of us would probably be content with a Minority Report holo-display. But 3D has made giant leaps forward since the era of green/red goggles and campy movies. In fact it has matured so much, that the current-gen 3D goggles hardly have any colorization at all and work on regular CRT monitors. I participated in a study on 3D anatomy memorization once, where you got to look at a 3D representation of a spinal column. You could rotate it and everything, it looked great in 3D if a little lowres.

Imagine that technology 10 years later when everybody has HDTV's. Imagine seeing shoot'em ups in 3D. A bullet hell in your room, all around you? I think I have just touched Topher's dreams. Imagine seeing platformers in 3D (no not Mario 64!). With motion controls, you could even BE Kirby without dressing up like him/her in your living room and errr.. never mind that part.

Imagine seeing racers in 3D. Duck as you try to evade incoming debris after a Burnout crash, notice cars on your sides, closing in on your left and right sides. That all sounds pretty sweet doesn't it? You would have increased immersion, a heightened sense of awareness and much more chemicals running through your brain, all of which would make a game so much sweeter to play. And that's only before toking up!



Now imagine FPS in 3D. Imagine seeing your hands in RL, and seeing a different set of hands in-game at the same time. Think Mirror's-Edge-ingame-tech-demo-trailer but then as a real game and with photorealistic graphics and without scripted animation sequences for kicking/grabbing things. Cameron mentions how games could be so much more immersive in 3D, but I think there is a limit to that. A physical limit which still needs to be studied and explored. One of the reasons FPS's have never looked like they were your vision, is because you don’t view the real world on a flat screen. You view two parts, filter out the excessive movements that your head makes, focus attention on whatever you are looking at, and then combine all of that into one mental image. Your hands in a game will never look like your hands in real life, because you just never look at them in such a way.

This is only one of the pitfalls that 3D will have to overcome. A 3D FPS could be very immersive when it just displays something like a helmet-vision of your character in-game. But when you add drunken movement, seeing two sets of arms in 3D, falling off a helicopter in a scripted sequence… you can see how wrong it could go. Hell, Marathon: Durandal managed to make people sick with Doom-graphics on a flat 2D screen. Imagine extrapolating such effects and turning them into 3D. You could probably make the most nauseating game ever made. Or, you could perhaps make a 3D game experience that elicits the same effects as LSD or other psychotropic drugs. The possibilities are huge, but it will take a long time to get there.



Also, look at how long HDTV has taken to become widespread. 3D games would require a pretty large display, depending on how far away you are from the screen. Let’s say a 52" display would be good at 10 feet away. Imagine such a size for displaying 3D objects. Now imagine a screen 4x that size. You really want to be in the game, don’t you? So it’s going to take a while to get to that stage of giant 3D displays and room-size immersion.

To infinity, and beyond!
I think 3D will initially be seen as a gimmick. The Avatar game that will come with the movie, will be in 3D. In the first decade after such a technical leap in innovation, it will take some time for the industry to adapt. Especially because it won’t be for everyone. Just like 2D fighters turned into 3D and then ended up co-existing in both 3D and 2D, so too will true-3D games and normal games coexist for a long time. Eventually, 3D will become mainstream just as cinema blockbusters will all become 3D at some point. And people will still be making 2D independent drama movies that can be just as good, if not better. 3D display will not replace old technology, just like 3D games never replaced 2D games. The focus has shifted for games, true, but 2D games are still around if not flourishing again.

By the time we'll have Minority Report displays, 3D displays might be bigger than every other display form. Until then, technical innovation will start slow and gain momentum over the years. An interesting thing to notice is how we have started out viewing content object-oriented, where a 2D character or ship means the same thing to everybody who views it. This is the same way that old philosophers looked at the world before Descartes and Kant's shift to the subject-oriented reality.

A move to seeing everything in 3D would make a game feel different to everybody else, but it would still just be our eyes interpreting signals from the outside world. I can see future technologies where we would just wear a cap that directly influences our thought processes. Neuroscience is moving faster and faster, showing us which parts of our brains do what. It's a matter of time before we start to influence our brains directly. We already do it with small chips that make blind people see and help paralyzed people move again. Why not use such technology to implant a world directly into our minds? I don't really want to be Douglas Quaid yet, but it's a logical evolution of a technological advance.

While we currently focus on representing the objective reality as realistically as possible, 3D may fulfill that promise. The only logical step is to turn to subjective reality as the great thinkers have done centuries before us. Then again, it raises new questions in itself. One of the biggest questions could be: how would you play multiplayer in a subjective game world?

We’ll have to see where it goes and when it does, but 3D is here to stay and it’s going to rock our world. Gratz on making it through this tl;dr post.


What are your thoughts on a possible 3D revolution in gaming? Are there things you definitely want to see in 3D, things you definitely DO NOT WANT to see in 3D (eg.: CGI hentai in 3D, Yaoi). And where do you think technical innovation will go after fulfilling the promise of true 3D?

Also: " and ' seems to fuckup for some reason, it seems to work for others. I think I found most of them, fuck it otherwise :)