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JWeinCom on 07 October 2020
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The_Liquid_Laser said:
JWeinCom said:

"Heh, you really want to tear this whole 1D/2D thing apart with a fine toothed comb."

No, I really don't.

There's a picture of pong. The image of the paddles and the ball all have size and therefore are not zero dimensional. They all have length and width and are not one dimensional.

We can be sure they have at least two dimensions. That's as far as we need to go to disprove your claim. If you want to argue that they are actually three dimensional, you'd have to demonstrate that they have depth, and I'm not sure how we'd do that.

Whether 3D images can be displayed on a flat plane is a more complex question, but if we can't get definitions on points, line segments, and rectangles down, I'm not gonna go there.

Heh, you may not have read my original point, so let me go back to that.  I'm saying the transition from Generation 2 to 3 is the biggest.  The reasons are

1) Graphics - Transition from dots and sticks to actual 2D shapes like Mario and Link.  Of course if I call these dots and sticks 1D, then everyone has a hissy fit, but my point is that a character like Mario on NES has a hell of a lot more graphical depth than Pitfall on Atari 2600.
2) NES games had music.  Most Atari 2600 games did not.
3) Most Atari games had gameplay that was score-based, like arcade games, while NES games came to be about getting to the end of the game.
4) This change in gameplay lead to the downfall of the arcade.

This was my original point as it pertains to the topic of this thread.  For some reason people seem to really want to focus on the first point and I don't know why.

But to try to clarify with respect to 1D/2D or 2D/3D, my point is that people don't have any problem calling Generation 5 the 3D Generation even though there are lots of aspects that aren't really 3D.  I was using an analogy to show how early gaming went from 1D to eventually 2D on the NES, but at that point several people (including yourself) got very rigid about what 1D had to be even though people aren't terribly rigid with how they define 3D on the PS1 or N64.  A line segment is a one dimensional shape and early gaming was full of line segments.  Once we got to the NES, we stopped seeing line segments.

You're original point is fine. I don't necessarily agree (I'd have to think on it more), but it's a defensible position. Audio is a part I really hadn't considered, so that's a solid point at least.

The thing is, if you say something sensible and then something that's really out there like pong balls being zero dimensional, people are going to focus on the wacky part, particularly if you keep defending it. 

The reason people are less rigid about 3D gaming is because it's a much trickier concept. In Minecraft for instance, I can make an object and can describe its depth. Me and my friend can each make a block cube in Minecraft, and we can compare which one has more volume. I can instruct someone how to construct something in Minecraft by describing its dimensions in terms of length, width, and depth, at least by using informal units of measurements. I can say a cube is 3 blocks long, 3 blocks wide, and 3 blocks deep.

So, the question is whether my Minecraft cube is actually a 3D image that's being displayed on a 2D screen, or is it a 2D image that is being made to appear 3D with visual trickery. If it is 2D, and if I have two versions of the same image and put them side by side, is it now 3D even though it's really the same thing?

Those are complex questions that don't really have an easy answer.


By comparison, whether or not the paddles in pong is 1D is a very easy question. It has length, width, and area. No.

Last edited by JWeinCom - on 07 October 2020