THE GRID: PLAY PERSPECTIVE
TV screens display a flat picture, just li movies, comics, and postcards. T picture has two dimensions: up and dow left and right. The other dimensic forward and away, adds the quality depth that gives us the picture of real life we know it. It is possible for the compu to simulate the third dimension to produ three-dimensional graphics on the scre but as yet, there isn’t enough room either arcade or game computers generate these three-dimensional images So we’re currently playing two-dime sional games.
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THE GRID: PLAY PERSPECTIVE
TV screens display a flat picture, just li movies, comics, and postcards. T picture has two dimensions: up and dow left and right. The other dimensic forward and away, adds the quality depth that gives us the picture of real life we know it. It is possible for the compu to simulate the third dimension to produ three-dimensional graphics on the scre but as yet, there isn’t enough room either arcade or game computers generate these three-dimensional images
So we’re currently playing two-dime sional games. But besides the efforts beii made to compute the third dimension f tomorrow’s new games, there are tv perspectives used in current games whii offer different sensations of dimension.
Space Invaders and Pac-Man are repr sentative of the first dimensional approad This is more or less a colorful but flat gan board—Pac’s maze is especially suited fi this. The play is in movement in differ® directions all on the same plane. This twi dimensional approach is a bit clifferei because it suggests the third dimension , part of the program graphic. Atari’s Nigl Driver is one example of this—a techniqo that worked particularly well with c racing games. It is as if the player wei driving the car straight into the depths i the screen, with the dangers of the ros approaching over the horizon.
Since this second approach is als basically two-dimensional, it won’t worko many games, the perspective not supplj ing as comfortable a point of view as mai action games. But this approach doi suggest what three-dimensional games w be like: imagine playing Pac-Man 3-1 actually rolling down the maze, wa towering above Pac, changing in diredio and dimension during the play.
It is difficult to imagine the effect playing a full color, high resolution, fine shaded 3-D game. In a way, it dependso the capacity of computers involved an realism that can be achieved. Will there 1 computer games that generate graphics people who look as real as real people o TV? Or will computer 3-D graphics I more rough and fantastic, as they are non At first, we can only expect the most vagi 3-D effects, for the technology shifts slow from one state to the next. But it is possib that eventually the computer games w become terminals serviced by one gigant computer capable of generating absolute TV-true-to-life graphics of peoples, place and things? We think so.
