It was a dark and lonely night and I had writer’s block and wasn’t in much of a mood for anything.

Then one of my best friends plopped a 3DS on my table. “You need something to write to about. Get it back to me later this week.” After asking how many versions of Civilization one person needed, I should have ignored her. But I took the advice as well as it was intended and thought I would write up a token post to show that I noticed and that I listened. A throwaway post to just get things moving.

I mean, what could the 3DS really say to me or what could I say about it? It has nothing to do with strategy gaming.

Which is something worth writing about.

I hate it when she’s right about my blog. It is very annoying and it keeps happening.

Anyway, as I dabbled in Pilot Wings and tried to make sure I was holding the damnable thing just far enough away for the 3D effect to work, I realized how much I loved my DS. I don’t play it very often, but for a flight or a bus trip, it’s really the perfect strategy platform. From Advance Wars to Age of Empires to Dawn of Discovery, the DS proved to be amazingly adept at translating traditional strategy gaming. I can’t be sure how many of these titles were sold – Advance Wars was an instant hit, but others never really cracked through – but given the modest budgets and expectations, I can’t imagine they were all bad ideas.

Pilot Wings, however, reminded me that this 3D view – as technically amazing as it is – will be a tough bandwagon for strategy devs to sign on to. Sure, we have the touch pads for modern tablets and phones (as with the DS, this proves to be a great interface for strategy), but if 3D catches on, there will be little room for strategy and war at the table.

Now, it’s not like 3D and strategy gaming have not had this conversation before. How many forums dedicated to old and established games have you played that have led to a schism among those preferring the look of a 2D map to that of 3D? Some of the complaints were rooted in the fact that strategy gamers are usually late adopters of tech because computer power and technical innovation is usually driven by RPGs and FPSes in the visual sphere, and even in UI in some important ways.

The DS was different. It married old school game design (nothing was really complicated) to an intuitive and quite sophisticated touch display. Sure, I never got the hang of flicking things in Rhythm Heaven, but dragging and tapping came naturally. And since the DS is designed to be played while you have nothing else to do, it actually fit strategy gaming just fine.

Now, of course there is always a chance that 3D gaming will be a bust, that the 3DS and 3DTV will never really catch on. At this point it’s hard to tell because the tech is still in its infancy. It’s easy for gamers like my readers to dismiss the Wii and motion control in general, but Microsoft and Sony didn’t look at Nintendo’s gamble and see a failure – they saw money to be made in aping it with Kinect and Move. And 3D is one of those things that just might be flashy enough to draw developer dollars.

Developers, of course, are not forced to embrace every new technology. Strategy gaming has been spared motion control for the most part and the PC bias of the strategy genre means that console development has not really been a huge thing for me, though, as Tom Chick is fond of pointing out, many of the best light strategy games live on consoles.

The DS was different though. It’s a platform that skews young AND was strategy friendly. It wasn’t a matter of being one of hundreds of light strategy games on XBLA; this was a platform that was almost made for the genre. The stylus is a mouse for all intents and purposes and the dual screen divides information and play area in a way that avoids the need for many menus.

I am not saying that the 3DS is the end of portable strategy gaming, but it’s hard to play a 3D game on it and see how that effect would translate. What would Advance Wars or Combat Mission 3DS even look like? Yes, you could stick to 2D mode but then why bother with the 3DS at all? It’s not like the development kits are any cheaper.

I think the DS was the platform that convinced me that strategy gaming is tactile, even beyond its boardgame roots. It’s about grabbing things and moving them. RPGs used to be like that, but now the biggest ones resemble racing, FPS and platform games in that they are more about steering a single character or group, shifting perspective or lead actor in very few cases. 3D is a technology that is all about perspective, about showing you things in a new way, but not necessarily from a variety of eyeballs. It’s a technology that privileges motion and action and while the old DS was happy to have games that let you stop, a true 3D view loses something when your turn ends and you have to wait for Egypt to move.

I am not down on the 3DS – I honestly have not had enough time with it to love or hate. I love the technology and the view and the possibilities it opens for games assuming that developers want to spend the time on that. And I would love to be proven wrong. But for now, my current DS will do.

And I promise to finish the first stage of Rhythm Heaven before E3.