With manufacturers rolling out 3-D television sets, the promise of videogames that transport players into deeply immersive 3-D worlds is inching closer to reality.
Emphasis on the inching. The burden of 3-D glasses, the cost of a brand-new 3-D TV, the paucity of programming – all the reasons that adoption of 3-D television will be slow as molasses also apply to games. But there's one more treacly trap: Creating compelling games that drive players to buy expensive new 3-D setups.
Designers say it's easy to drop 3-D into an existing game, but that's where the work begins. As a result, it could be quite a while before consoles get their Avatar – a blockbuster title that fundamentally changes gamers' experience and expectations in the same way James Cameron's sci-fi smash has for movies.
"Since so many games are built on 3-D engines, run on ever-more-powerful machines and are displayed in HD, it's becoming easy to make them stereoscopic," said game designer Heather Kelley in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. Still, "stereoscopy is almost always just an enhancement to the image and the sense of 'immersion,' rather than a true game-changer," she said.
To create a killer game that makes 3-D a must, designers need to start from the bottom up.
"I think you have to design for stereoscopy, even if it's just for a superficial spectacle that in no way affects the gameplay," said Fez designer Phil Fish in an e-mail. "Even just getting the 'wow' factor right is going to mean changing the way we do a lot of things."
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At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 3-D television sets were the hottest topic. Most every major manufacturer, from Sony to Samsung, showed new 3-D televisions that work with special glasses to bring a high-quality stereoscopic image right into your living room.
Sony made PlayStation 3 a big part of its pitch, promising lots of 3-D game content. But despite all the hype, some say that mass market 3-D gaming remains a long way off.
"It will take a few years to get broad penetration of 3-D displays, and the burden of wearing glasses will limit penetration," said Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter in an e-mail interview. "Games will probably have 3-D built in, but it won't be a huge selling feature for at least five years, if not longer."
Console makers have varying takes on the viability of 3-D gaming. John Koller, director of PlayStation hardware marketing for Sony, said his company is committed to publishing many 3-D titles in late 2010 and in 2011. "We'll be providing enough of a game lineup to make it mass-market," he said.
Microsoft is less enthusiastic about the near-term potential of 3-D. Aaron Greenberg, director of project management for Xbox, said that while the Xbox 360 supports 3-D display, it is "up to developers" whether they want to produce 3-D games.
"There's a tiny, tiny, microscopic number of consumers that are invested in buying 3-D TVs and that I think will do so any time in the near future," said Greenberg. "If people want to make one of those games, they're obviously welcome to ... but that market is relatively small because of the investment needed."
To drive consumer demand, gamemakers will need to cook up killer apps that make gamers want the tech, much like James Cameron's Avatar movie did for 3-D televisions. According to a recent study by the electronics retailer Retrevo, consumer awareness of 3-D televisions increased from 39 percent to 60 percent after the release of the acclaimed film.
The "3-D enabled" videogame version of Avatar hasn't been so lucky: Critics were lukewarm (it currently scores an average rating of 60 percent on Metacritic) and publisher Ubisoft said sales were lower than it expected.
Coming up with compelling 3-D games could prove harder than it looks, according to designers Kelley and Fish. Their "experimental game" collective Kokoromi put on a 2008 event called Gamma 3D in Montreal, soliciting and exhibiting works from indie game designers who were using low-tech, red-blue anaglyph 3-D.
Of the games submitted, Kelley called out The Depths to Which I Sink as the only one completely dependent on 3-D vision to play. "It actually uses the color information, and removes other natural cues," she said. "What it proved to me was that using only anaglyphic stereoscopy in your gameplay is extremely challenging."
Because games can include multiple display options, publishers don't need to wait for the technology to become standardized, Kelley added. But simply layering on 3-D technology can also highlight a game's visual flaws, according to Fez designer Fish.
"Things like matte-painted backgrounds become obviously flat" when viewed through stereoscopic glasses, he said. "You can tell these mountains are just on a plane behind that farm or whatever. Everything that's an alpha plane, like a blade of grass, also becomes painfully flat."
Much as with Avatar, Cameron's 3-D sci-fi steamroller that is close to becoming the all-time worldwide box office champ a month after its release, full immersion into virtual worlds could be the key to 3-D games' success.
"Our objective for the launch (of 3-D on PlayStation 3) is to continue to place players in a position to become part of the game," said Sony's Koller. "It's always been kind of that Holy Grail.... Immersing the player into the game even further is the goal of most developers and publishers at this point."
There's one final problem facing gamemakers hoping for a 3-D high. For gamers to want 3-D games, they have to try them first. Gamemakers trying to sell 3-D content will run into a marketing challenge much like the one Nintendo faced with its 1995 introduction of Virtual Boy, a portable stereoscopic game machine.
Players stuck their heads into the Virtual Boy visor, which sent separate signals to each eye. As a result, only the person playing it could see what was going on. Virtual Boy screenshots in magazines didn't convey any real information about what games actually looked like. And nobody could watch their friends play over their shoulders or sitting on the couch.
Needing to use 3-D glasses to get the experience of stereoscopic gaming will likely cause a similar problem, especially as prices remain high. (A representative for Sony Electronics said the company was not yet ready to share details about how expensive its new televisions would be in 2010 or how many it expected to sell.)
It's likely that relatively few consumers will invest the thousands of dollars it will take to get 3-D up and running in their homes this year or in 2011. Once the price of televisions and glasses drops, that will probably change, especially since every TV maker is pushing the technology hard. Once 3-D TVs get a foothold, the 3-D games will follow.
"Yeah, its gonna get big," said Fish. "What else do they have to get you to buy a new TV?"
Top photo: Sony demos 3-D gaming at its PlayStation 3 booth at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Photo: nixiepixel / Flickr / Creative Commons
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