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Tech

Nintendo at GDC: Content Is King, But The 3DS Still Makes My Head Hurt

It really just made my head hurt. A lot.
Janus Rose
New York, US

When Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata came on stage to present his retrospective on the last 25 years of videogames at the Game Developers Conference, he began in a way few CEOs do — with a story of personal failure. In heavily-accented but firmly articulated english, the CEO recalled his first days with Nintendo after coming over from his own development studio, HAL Laboratory. It was here that he challenged one of the most celebrated figures in gaming history — none other than Shigeru Miyamoto: Mr. Nintendo himself.

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"I was confident that the software I was making was technically superior to Mr. Miyamoto's," he recalled. But just like an overzealous jedi apprentice, Iwata saw his product outsold by Miyamoto's by enormous margins. "To be honest, I was ashamed," he said. But in getting schooled by one of videogames' greats, Iwata realized that engineering wasn't quite as important as imagination; that "content is king."

It's a story we'd expect to hear from Nintendo, whose right-brain thinking has brought them to the top of the heap in hardware sales again and again. But is content truly still "king" in the company's current offerings? Knowing Nintendo's legacy of famous "we told you so" moments, it might be too early to make predictions on their newest gaming portable, the 3DS. But for this humble journalist, considering the possible role of this device in today's market was much like the experience of actually playing it — exciting, and perhaps more than a little disorienting.

First off, full disclosure: It's my belief that 3D is the most unnecessary and pretentious gimmick in entertainment technology today — the end result of a long board meeting which sought to quickly remedy falling movie ticket and HD TV sales. And moreover, it really doesn't work all that well with humans (read Walter Murch's technical explanation in his letter to Roger Ebert here).

When Nintendo announced that they had created a portable 3D gaming system that didn't require special glasses, everyone at E3 seemed to simultaneously let out a collective 'whaaaaa?' A year later, all biases asides, I still found myself itching to experience Nintendo's vision for the future of 3D gaming.

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Nintendo's booth in the GDC expo hall was strangely uncrowded when we arrived, which I imagine was because most developers and journalists had already tried the system earlier that week. Still, it was a bit bizarre considering how large the conference was and how "hands-on" a system like the 3DS is. Due to the nature of the technology, Nintendo was at a loss when tasked with demonstrating the product last July, presenting instead a quirky commercial that gave a vague idea of what portable 3D gaming would be like. But just like with the Wii, the only way to truly "get it" was to play it yourself.

As I held the smoothly-contoured console, I tried to be absolutely certain that I wasn't bollocking it up somehow. A slider on the right side of the top screen allowed me to adjust the "intensity" of the 3D effect, and much like many in first impressions I had read, I found myself constantly futzing with it and readjusting my viewing angle to ensure an optimal playing experience.

But it really just made my head hurt. A lot.

It didn't seem so much like the world of Lego Star Wars was coming to life — it felt more like my eyes were being hacked. As I continued, visually exploring the depth of each scene seemed to require an increasing amount of effort on my part, almost like I was collaborating with the machine rather than merely using it. After about 10 minutes of this I turned down the 3D slider all the way.

A week later at PAX East I tried out Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition at the Capcom booth. Things were less fuzzy this time around, but I still had this feeling of cross-eyedness and disorientation. Who knows, maybe I'm just really bad at this. But with 3D already obnoxiously pervasive in the entertainment biz, I had to wonder if this kind of experience is what we actually want, and whether the 3DS is really celebrating "content" or simply trying something different and hoping for the best.

Nintendo is no stranger to hardware gimmicks. In the past, they've both sank and swam by the mantra that a single crazy idea can change everything. (For an example of 'sank,' see the Virtual Boy.) But what's strange about the 3DS is that the gimmick seems much more catered to current technology trends than Nintendo's first-kid-on-the-block Wii console, which undeniably set the tone for the next 5 years of videogame interfaces.

If the 3DS winds up being a gimmicky shovelware platform similar to what the Wii eventually became, Iwata's treatise on the importance of content will seem like a whole bunch of hot air. But like always, the true burden will rest firmly on the shoulders of developers and the choices they make with the technologies given to them. And like Iwata demonstrated with his defeat at the hands of Miyamoto, game development has always been about learning from each other.