The_Liquid_Laser said:
No, I am being perfectly honest. The biggest mistake I've made is that I misjudged how much (or little) people understand geometry.
A square has an interior, and so does a rectangle. That is why the objects in Pong are not 2D. The controls are clearly not 2D either. Gaming started out as purely 1D in the sense that the graphics and controls were purely in 1D.
Here is a quick geometry lesson. Go ask any mathematician and you may be shocked that they tell you the exact same thing.
0 Dimensional - a point (a dot)
1 Dimensional - part of a line; a line segment (a stick)
2 Dimensional - part of a plane; often polygons (especially in video games). Two dimensional shapes have a one dimensional border like a line segment or a curve. This defines the two dimensional interior.
3 Dimensional - part of space, often polyhedrons (especially in video games). Three dimensional shapes have two dimensional borders such polygons. These borders define the three dimensional interior. When you see calculations about number of polygons rendered they are talking about the exterior of a shape. More polygons enables more smoothness and definition.
So if you look at Pong, Generation 1, it is limited by 1D graphics and controls. It is just two line segments (1D) hitting a dot (0D), and you can only move up or down (1D). This is very similar to how the NES is limited by 2D graphics and controls. There isn't much 1D or 3D in NES games. It as pure 2D as you can get. (Some late games had parallax scrolling. That's about it.) The SNES is also considered a 2D system, but it is starting to push the envelope into 3D: crude games like Star Fox, character models like Donkey Kong, and tons and tons of parallax scrolling. It's trying to push into 3D, but it's still very limited to fundamentally 2D graphics and controls. The Atari 2600 is very much like this with respect to 1D. It really is trying to push into 2D, probably even more than the SNES is pushing into 3D, but so many games are limited to line segments and dots, 1 dimensional graphics. There are also plenty of games where you can only move left or right, 1 dimensional controls. It's trying hard to be 2D, but there are still lots of 1D limitations on the games.
Graphics are not really 2D until you have an interior though. One big reason that Dragon Quest became popular was because of the art of Akira Toriyama, who also created Dragon Ball. The NES was the first system where his art could have been relevant. NES characters had an interior and that allowed him to make all of those Dragon Quest creatures that are still used today. His art would have been wasted on a system like the Atari 2600 where the characters do not have an interior, and he would most have had to work with something like stick figures or other crude shapes. Graphically, an interior is a very important distinction.
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