There are tons of buzz words or declarations of a “new era” in gaming all the time. Some people say that gaming grew up the day that GTA3 hit the market. Others say that gaming grew up the moment we started aspiring to Hollywood levels of production value. Even more would say we “grew up” when social media and games began to merge. I suppose different people have different views of what constitutes as maturity. Well, I’ll throw my own hat onto that arena. I think that gaming grew up in 2010. Milestones are one thing, but actual maturity is another. Gaming grew up because we finally learned to throw away the distinction between 2D and 3D games and look at things from the perspective of one thing: fun.
The common belief is that we entered into the world of 3D game design back in 1995 when the PlayStation hit the market. That was a lie perpetuated by Sony, as well as Nintendo the next year. The PlayStation ushered in an era where polygons became the defacto Lego blocks for the objects that populate our virtual worlds of imagination and dreams. But polygons are just that: Lego blocks. Vectors and textures, sprites and pixels, it’s all the same thing – just different tools used to piece a world together. Ultimately, we were still playing our games on a flat television screen, a technology that hadn’t changed one iota (minus the addition of color in the mid 1960s) in over half a century.
With the revelation of the Nintendo 3DS back at E3, suddenly the gaming media was faced with a small dilemma. What should we call it? Suddenly the 3DS was being referred to as the “world’s first 3D gaming platform.” Journalists got the distinction, but players less astute with gaming industry lingo were left scratching their heads. “Didn’t we begin 3D gaming back in 1995?” may have been a common response. Thus a six month re-education of the gamer populace has taken place. Suddenly people realize the distinct difference between a polygonal game and a true 3D game.
Suddenly with that distinction firmly in place, the line between games designed to be played in a 3D space and games designed to be played on a 2D plane was considerably blurred. You can make a 2D game with polygons. You can also make a 3D game that uses sprites. It doesn’t matter. A good game, is a good game. 2D games were no longer seen as culturally dated. While the comeback of 2D game design had already been many years in the making, 2010 and the re-evaluation of what truly constitutes as a 3D gaming experience seemed to have firmly established the fact that gaming culture has finally matured to the point that we can accept 2D and 3D games as equals, both in the retail and digital marketplaces. That alone is reason to celebrate going into 2011.
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