I Needed Glasses for Glasses-Free 3D on the 3DS

When the Nintendo 3DS originally released in March 2011, I should have known something was a little wonky with my eyesight.

I picked up the system on launch day as a longtime Nintendo console and handheld fan, despite the launch day software offering being a little lacklustre, mostly out of a mixture of faith that the software library would improve over time and excitement to try out the system’s newest Nintendo gimmick, glasses free 3D.

The 3DS featured a slider on the right hand side of its upper screen which could be used to create a perceived sense of depth in supported software. Games could make projectiles appear to leave the screen and come slightly toward the player, or could appear to sink backwards into the screen creating a sense of depth to the games involved.

Here’s the thing, the 3D effect did work for me, and I did find that it added something cool to games that supported it, but I had to play my 3DS in a slightly wonky way to get the 3D image to show correctly. I had to tilt the system slightly, so that the left hand side of the screen was further away from me and the right side of the screen a little closer. Unless I did that, I couldn’t get the 3D image to appear in focus.

I’m not great at telling when something’s wrong with my body, or remembering to check in on how my body is doing. In part that might be down to my lack of interoception as an autistic person, I’m not great at reading my body’s own signals about its needs, and in part it might be due to my struggling to make and attend medical appointments as a person with ADHD. Either way, I often go far longer between medical checkups than you are supposed to.

Recently, I went for my first eyesight check up with an optician in over a decade. Turns out, the reason I needed to tilt my 3DS further away on my left side to see the 3D effect is because I am farsighted in my left eye, and struggle to focus on things if they’re nearby. My right eye does a decent job of compensating and filling in the blanks, but for things like that 3D effect that need my eyes to be in sync with each other, it causes some issues.

I got my first pair of glasses a few days ago. They’re not always going to be needed, but they should help in certain contexts to help clear up my vision, reduce headaches I experience when focusing on nearby objects for too long, and help to reduce the effects of my astigmatism. These are all really practical benefits, but they’re not the thing that I found myself thinking about most this morning when I sat down in my office with my new glasses ready to try them on.

It turns out that, yes, 13 years later, I can now see the 3D effect on a 3DS without having to tilt my screen further away from my left side. I can just look at the screen head on while wearing my glasses and see the effect as intended.

Now, I’m not saying that in 2011 I should have used my experience with the Nintendo 3DS to diagnose myself with slightly uneven vision. But, as someone who put off getting my eyes checked for a long time, maybe it should have been a reminder to go get a regularly scheduled eye exam, just as an opportunity to ask if that might be indicative of anything specific. It might have been nothing, but checking whether or not that was the case could have led to doing something about the issue a lot sooner.

It’s easy when you live with a body that’s your own to forget to check in sometimes on if things you experience are normal, or abnormal. It’s easy to assume that quirks of your lived experience aren’t worth further consideration, or that there’s nothing you can necessarily do about them. I just spent years playing my 3DS while holding it a little awkwardly if I wanted to see it in 3D, and didn’t think to check if there was anything that might help to avoid needing to do that. You sometimes just get used to muddling through with things the way that they are.

I’ve found, as a disabled gamer, this is often how I end up interacting with accessibility tools and options when it comes to gaming. It’s not until someone points out to me that my struggle is unusual, or I find a feature that unexpectedly removes a barrier for me, that I realise I don’t necessarily have to put up with things being the way they are.

Until I tried on my new glasses, I didn’t appreciate how immediate a fix they would be for an issue that I had assumed I just had to live with when gaming more than a decade ago.

Until I tried them on in a dark room yesterday, I didn’t realise how much they would reduce the twinkling radiance appearance of emergency exit lights, letting me look toward them and see crisp clear edges to the design without rays of light appearing to branch off of them.

I didn’t know how much I could be supported until that support was in place.

This seems like it might be a bit of a tangent from the above story, but something this experience got me thinking about was the way that we nestle accessibility settings into video game menus, and the ways that might at times prevent people from finding accessibility support that they didn’t know would help them and their individual use cases.

If you’ve followed this series for any length of time, you likely know that I’m a big fan of the accessibility setup menu formula seen in games like God of War: Ragnarok. That game on first boot offers a quick skip to the main menu or a guided accessibility quick start setup, within which is a series of partial or complete settings presets designed for specific common disability categories, followed by an accessibility settings menu linked on the main title page. I don’t think any of this is bad or needs to be changed, but I do think that having accessibility settings options mirrored inside the standard settings menu areas, and not exclusively appearing in the accessibility menu area, is important for avoiding players missing out on features that they might not know would help them.

I’m not against dedicated accessibility menus, I think they’re great, they make accessibility settings easy to find for those who know that they need them. But if you’re someone with a lingering issue, one that you’ve not stopped to consider whether is unusual or uncommon and could be supported, you might not think to test out accessibility settings in a dedicated accessibility menu. If they’re also able to be found in menus that are divorced from the label of accessibility, then they’re easier for someone who doesn’t realise they could do with support to stumble on them rather than walk straight past them.

Sometimes, it’s possible to live with an issue for years and simply not think to address it. I was never going to stumble upon a pair of glasses calibrated to fix my weird eye issues, but if we make sure that accessibility settings are able to be stumbled upon, someone might find their software equivalent magical fix settings options by pure chance.

Sometimes it’s not until you try a setting that you realise it’s helpful, and anything we can do to increase the likelihood of that happening seems like a positive.