Gaming goes hyperdimensional

My wife likes to make fun of my spatial reasoning skills. She’s an intern architect and a master closet packer, able to maximize the use of space in any situation. In contrast, whenever I try to imagine any but the simplest, most static of three-dimensional spaces, my brain starts moving very, very slowly. I mostly navigate the world by thinking about space in either the plan or elevation view.

As a kid, I always failed those tests where you had to imagine rotating a solid object and then pick it out from a list of similar solids. I never solved my Rubik’s cube, despite wasting man-months of my life in the attempt.

My condition couldn’t have been helped by the amount of time I spent racing around in the two-dimensional Nintendo dungeons of my formative years.

I’ve grown comfortable with the 3D interfaces that have become standard console game fare in the last decade or so. But it was not an easy transition. I remember one nauseous dream that consisted of being trapped in a sped-up Super Mario 64 level. I gave up after less than an hour of playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, declaring that no 3D Zelda could ever be as good as 2D A Link to the Past (now that I think about it, I’m not sure that this prediction was actually wrong).

But why stop with straightforward three-dimensional gameplay? One of the great things about virtual worlds is the possibility of bending even our most basic physical rules. Super Paper Mario for the Wii, and more recently the indy game Fez, have experimented with gameplay where the same virtual space can be 3D one minute, 2D the next, as if your in-game persona were the sphere from Abbott’s Flatland. One of last year’s biggest sleeper hits, Portal, throws you into a world where you can create wormholes that flatten distances and bend gravity around corners. 4D Tetris, anyone?

I’m in no position to review these games, since I haven’t played any of them. If I did, I think I would have smoke coming out of my ears. But I’m interested to see if games like this catch on, and what advances in science and mathematics might come from a generation that grew up playing them.

There’s been quite a bit of evidence that video games can teach the brain new tricks. Will the kids of tomorrow be as comfortable working in Hilbert space as the rest of us are on a Cartesian graph? Quantum mechanics, cosmology, systems analysis, topology, and game theory, among countless others, are fields that could benefit from minds that are natively hyperdimensional.

Then again, all those hours with the Rubik’s cube didn’t teach me anything.