Dimension-Bending Games Stretch Fabric of Space and Time

[Dave Monroe]

Games Without Frontiers
Commentary by  Clive Thompson

Dimension-Bending Games Stretch Fabric of Space and Time
06.04.07 | 2:00 AM

In the famous Victorian satire Flatland, a two-dimensional square is
suddenly plucked out of his flat world and lifted into the third
dimension. It is a spiritually mind-blowing experience -- by looking
down on his flat house, the square is suddenly able to see the insides
of objects that, when he was 2-D, appeared solid. He sees through the
walls of his house: His children sleeping in their rooms, the servants
in their quarters.

"I looked, and, behold, a new world!" he cried. "Lo, the secrets of
the earth, the depths of the mines and inmost caverns of the hills,
were bared before me."

When I read the book as a kid, the concept of slipping between
dimensions fried my tiny mind. I hankered after some new way to
recapture that sensation. Last week, I finally did, when I played
Super Paper Mario and Crush, two games that turn the Flatland conceit
into a piece of gameplay. In each one, you navigate puzzle worlds by
flipping from 2-D to 3-D -- and using the different perspectives to
explore hidden areas and fight enemies in unusual ways.

In Super Paper Mario, life begins as a regular 2-D game -- your Mario
is a flat, "paper" cutout in a world of paper cutouts -- until he
suddenly acquires the power to shift into a 3-D perspective. Suddenly
you can see that all your 2-D enemies are wafer-thin and easily
avoidable if you just sidestep them. When threatened by a horde of
onrushing Spiny Tromps, I didn't bother trying to jump over them -- I
just shifted perspective, stepped sideways, and they rolled past me
harmlessly like huge, flat coins. (Check some video of that here.)

The upshot is an experience precisely as hallucinogenic as Flatland
itself. Indeed, these titles permanently alter your sense of the
possibilities inside game-space. This is particularly true of Super
Paper Mario, because it completely renews the age-old Mario conceits
-- like the bricks, the tubes, the platforms. They're all here, except
that often they're concealing new stuff only visible in 3-D. I found
tons of hidden areas lurking behind boulders, and secret enemies
"inside" objects that appeared to be solid blocks in 2-D.

The upshot is you're left with a sort of giddy paranoia: I kept on
obsessively shifting into 3-D, convinced there was always something I
wasn't seeing from my mundane, lower-dimensional perspective.
Sometimes the platform I was standing on turned out to be a 3-D
construct, and I could wander off along the geometric Z-axis to find a
new zone. Other times I'd discover the platform was only a 2-D cutout
and -- whoops -- my 3-D body would fall off it.

In essence, the game instills the exact mentality with which a good
mathematician, geometrist or theoretical physicist views the world.
Seriously, they ought to make this thing mandatory in grade 3 math;
it's that good. Better yet, Nintendo includes several gorgeously sharp
in-jokes that directly reference Flatland. At one point, you rescue a
2-D man who's trapped in 3-D, unable to interact with his normal plane
of existence (which is similar to the basic plot of the novel). When
Mario is being trained to use a new power, his trainer tells him to
"hit the 2 button." Then he mutters that while Mario himself probably
won't know what a "2 button" is, "the being that watches over you from
another dimension" -- i.e. the game player -- will.

I'm sorry: That's just awesome.

This isn't purely about aesthetics, either. The shifting perspectives
significantly multiply the gameplay possibilities in a
platform-jumping game. In Crush, you navigate complicated 3-D levels
by "flattening" them into 2-D: For example, if you're standing on one
platform and have another one floating hundreds of feet away, you
flatten the world on the X axis and presto -- they're now adjacent.
This requires an ability to manipulate perspective that would
challenge most college students of geometry, and probably most
practicing architects.

All of which led me to wonder: Why haven't many other games explored
this territory before?

Games are a superb environment for experimenting with new perceptual
takes on geometry and physics. Designers craft these worlds from
scratch, after all; they don't have to obey normal laws of reality.
Yet with a few exceptions -- the gravity-inversion of games like Prey,
or the minor time distortions of games with "bullet time" and Prince
of Persia rewinds -- publishers rarely stray from simple, basic
reality. But is mere realism all that great?

Judging by these two games, I'd say not necessarily. The more we have
games that muck with our perceptions of reality, the more it'll unlock
the imaginations of the gamers who play them.

In fact, now I'm hankering a game that allows for even greater
dimensional messing. How about a game that lets us play along the 10
dimensions of modern string theory? This would be completely demented,
of course, and pretty hard to visualize on a screen -- though not
impossible, as you can see from this instructional video. There are a
lot of strange ways to view the world, and I'm ready to play all of
them.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/06/gamesfrontier_0604

Flatland

http://www.archive.org/details/flatlandromanceo00abbouoft

Super Paper Mario

http://wii.nintendo.com/site/spm/

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php