The “reality” of the game, while being superficially similar to the reality of the player, must at the same time be much simpler. Hence three-dimensional humans play in the two-dimensional world.
I disagree with this “axiom”. Most VR games that exist today simulate or model a 3D environment. It’s only the “rendering” that eventually becomes 2D because most of us have 2D monitors. But the model itself is in 3D, and as our display technology improves, we may eventually render to 3D, without needing to change anything about our model.
1) The game protagonists would resemble the players. Yet, the need for simplification would require them to be three-dimensional.
And so I suspect that creatures in a 4D world playing VR games would have their games model a 4D world, but perhaps would only render to 3D (because that’s what their “flat” screens are capable of displaying). If our universe were merely a simulated model in their game, we would expect our universe to be 4D.
“I disagree with this “axiom”. Most VR games that exist today simulate or model a 3D environment. ”
I suppose what I had in mind are games that model entire civilizations, rather than track the movements of one or several protagonists. In the latter case the “horizon” of the protagonists is very limited, allowing 3-D, but at the price of limiting the available space. However, if you want your protagonists to avoid bumping into the wall (remember “Truman Show”?), you might still need to give up one dimension.
See games such as Homeworld or Sins of the Solar Empire. These take place in 3D environments (outer space) with no “hard walls”: rather than explicitly forbidding you from leaving the “game zone”, there simply is no point to. There’s so much empty space between galaxies that you would never be able to fly from one galaxy to another before getting terribly bored with the game. So players are strongly motivated to stay within the star systems where the real action is.
Also, in the same way you can construct a finite but boundary-less 2D universe for your game (e.g. a universe on the surface of a sphere, or a universe on the surface of a torus), you can also construct a finite but boundary-less 3D universe for your game.
I disagree with this “axiom”. Most VR games that exist today simulate or model a 3D environment. It’s only the “rendering” that eventually becomes 2D because most of us have 2D monitors. But the model itself is in 3D, and as our display technology improves, we may eventually render to 3D, without needing to change anything about our model.
And so I suspect that creatures in a 4D world playing VR games would have their games model a 4D world, but perhaps would only render to 3D (because that’s what their “flat” screens are capable of displaying). If our universe were merely a simulated model in their game, we would expect our universe to be 4D.
“I disagree with this “axiom”. Most VR games that exist today simulate or model a 3D environment. ”
I suppose what I had in mind are games that model entire civilizations, rather than track the movements of one or several protagonists. In the latter case the “horizon” of the protagonists is very limited, allowing 3-D, but at the price of limiting the available space. However, if you want your protagonists to avoid bumping into the wall (remember “Truman Show”?), you might still need to give up one dimension.
See games such as Homeworld or Sins of the Solar Empire. These take place in 3D environments (outer space) with no “hard walls”: rather than explicitly forbidding you from leaving the “game zone”, there simply is no point to. There’s so much empty space between galaxies that you would never be able to fly from one galaxy to another before getting terribly bored with the game. So players are strongly motivated to stay within the star systems where the real action is.
Also, in the same way you can construct a finite but boundary-less 2D universe for your game (e.g. a universe on the surface of a sphere, or a universe on the surface of a torus), you can also construct a finite but boundary-less 3D universe for your game.