The Rabbit Hole

moonlightalice is doing a nice series of posts about PAXEast-related things. You should read her thoughts on the newest Prince of Persia game (unrelated to that movie you have to pretend I wasn't ever cautiously optimistic about).

One I'd like to chime in on is her post about THE FUTURE OF GAMING, which, much like the future of movies, is 3-D. However, unlike with movies, after trying out the demo at PAXEast, I'm not dismissive of gaming in another, additional dimension. I'm actually all for it. I only played the game in question for five minutes (tops), so I don't know if this will be a headache-and-nausea-inducing development for gaming. But this is something that could actually improve gaming (if it doesn't make us all sick).

Part of the problem I have with video games, especially jumping-puzzle games is that I have very poor depth perception in the screen. With the 3-D they introduced in the demo game, I didn't have that problem. I didn't have to rely on my eye estimating depth depending on color/size changes of objects in the background. There actually was a deep background to move through. Just changing that much would have been enough to persuade me out of my automatic rejection. But the glasses were superior, too. I've never not had problems with 3-D glasses. Turns out that if you make expensive ones that actually work...they work!

It won't happen any time soon--too few games would make this absolutely essential, or even be improved at all by it. But I could see this getting very popular in the next, say, five years.