There are a lot of things I love about gaming. Too many to list in one article, certainly; not only would it be the size of a small novel by the time I was done, it would also be full of tangents and meandering nonsense. Some could say that my articles already have plenty of that, so I shan’t push my luck on that front. But for all its wonders, there’s still plenty about gaming that I wish would just – for want of a better term – bugger off. Things that annoy me, or frustrate me, or make me want to give up and go back to playing games released before an ethernet socket or wifi antenna was a mandatory component on every console.

First up is 3D. We’ve tried this already, because I distinctly remember watching dinosaurs in wondrous blue and red when I was about seven years old. The technology has come a long way since then, I get that: but I’m still in no rush to feel like the screen is jumping out at me. The illusion of depth has never been done well – it has always felt tacked on or gimmicky. The worst cases are when the entire game is designed around the sole premise of stuff appearing closer or further away from the screen. Nowhere is this more prevalent than the 3DS. Thankfully, you can turn the 3D off, but this only stops the headaches: it doesn’t stem the tide of horrible implementation.

Think about it. 3D (in this fashion) can only trick your eyes into making things seem closer or further away than they actually are. When combined in a gradient fashion, it makes your brain think there’s something sticking out of the screen. But you know – and can always tell – that this isn’t the case. It’s a constant distraction and I, for one, am reminded of it almost every second I play with 3D on. It’s mentally jarring and removes any possibility of immersion, in the same way that reading a book where half the words popped out at you would be.

Now some of you might say “Oculus Rift”, possibly even mentioning the Virtuix Omni while you were at it. This is a different, more engaging type of 3D, which is certainly more along the lines of what I’d want as a replacement to 2D gaming. But we’re still taking a massive leap into the past, because I remember a rig very similar to this being used at an amusement park in central Scotland circa 1995. Sure, now you have the added requirement of wearing special shoes in order to slide about properly, but you’re otherwise in exactly the same “virtual reality” rig that existed all those years ago. It’s just that now the technology has improved… but not enough for it to be worthwhile.

This is all supposition, since I’ve never personally tried the Oculus or the Omni. But I can tell you that the idea behind it doesn’t appeal to me. It’s another incomplete experience that relies on tricking your senses into believing something that isn’t there and isn’t happening. To some, this might be a pretty good definition of games as a whole, but I don’t agree. When I’m playing on my consoles or my PC, I know that it’s a screen I’m watching. There’s a simulated world being projected onto it, but there’s no falsehood in this: it never tries to be something its not. The Oculus Rift tries to convince your eyes and your brain that you’re in a 3D environment, but it’s just using the same sort of techniques the 3DS does on a grander scale.

In order to remove the dissonance between what you see and what is really happening, the Oculus blocks out all other sight. Forced to see only the game world, your brain is more ready to accept what it sees as being real. Yet only one, perhaps two of your senses will be fooled by this. With the addition of the Omni, this might be increased to three, since you have the illusion of movement. Yet the jarring, unnatural reality of the situation would still be there. You’re still strapped into a frame, secured by the waist, slipping around on a semi-sphere of plastic in some funny shoes. No matter how hard developers try, the technology to replace 2D gaming still doesn’t exist yet.

It’s not that I fault them for trying. If no-one tried to make better and more innovative ways of playing games, it’d be a very boring world. What I’d like is for people to recognise the inadequacies of their efforts when things don’t end up like the bloody Matrix. Like motion control before it, 3D in its current state is a gimmick: nothing more. Yet we’re still seeing article after article, report after report praising it as a new level of gaming. It’s not. It won’t be for a long time. Even touch-screen interfaces, which have been around for over 6 years in a mainstream form, haven’t managed to replace keyboards, mice and gamepads. 3D gaming (and everything else 3D, especially movies, ARGH) is something I wish would hurry up and die again, so we can all get back to playing games properly. Wake me up when we have holodecks.

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