Why no mirrors in computer games?
I’m a fan of FPS Games (First Person Shooter) as they’re more emotional games thanks to the fact you’re in the middle of the action, everything you do has a deep impact on you, not others like in strategy games. I can get in the person of the main character better in a FPS game than in any other type of computer fantasy.
A FPS game
Recently it stroke me one thing: most of the current PC and console games lack mirrors of any kind (except auto simulators). If you’re in a FPS game made 10 years ago or one made this year there’s no difference: you can’t watch yourself in the mirror no matter what.
I know this is not a problem with computer hardware like it was many years ago when CPU performance was not enough to render a mirror image. I believe it has something to do with the psychological part of the game: by removing the option to watch yourself in the mirror the game producer doesn’t impose a certain style and lets you imagine how you look, allowing you to define your own style, which affects the way you play the game.
Leaving less to the imagination means a more framed game where there are limited things you can do. I don’t see any other reason for this. Do you? If you’re into games a lot you can try some of the best free games around the web, free of charge, of course.
Actually games before DID have mirrors, they disappeared somewhere around 04/05, but I have no idea why.
Mirrors were around from at least 1995 though, Duke 3d, Tekwar and others all had both vertical and horizontal mirrors.
Actually mirrors in computer games disappeared due to technical progress in graphics processors. GPUs became highly parallel with hundreds of cores rendering the image you see. In order for this parallelism to be possible the scene somehow needs to be distributed to those GPU cores, which is pretty simple in general. However, as soon as mirrors are added to the scene, suddenly one tiny little change in one part of the scene could cause another part of the scene that is far away to look completely different, because of the reflections by the mirror. So suddenly we have dependencies all over the place and our parallelism is gone, because one core can’t start to render before another core is done rendering etc. So the cost of adding a mirror to a scene is going back 10 years in graphics performance. Not really worth it.