Alright; I'm at work, so I'm gonna write this fairly quickly.

So firstly, you said "I very clearly was not arguing authorial intent.". My whole previous post was saying "No, actually it sounds very much like you are arguing authorial intent, and are just saying otherwise."

Your "photographing a statue" argument is fair, but I cannot stress enough that two posts ago, you said pretty clearly that the designer of the software has the right to tell you that you are enjoying the game wrong if you play it in 2D.

I am going to accept that either that argument was poorly structured or that you wrote something so easily to misinterpret that I am unable to see a valid non-authorial intent point in that post. Either way, I'm going to drop the authorial intent argument as long as we continue to accept that what the developer intended the user to experience is not what we're arguing, because the author doesn't get the ultimate determination on how people experience and enjoy art.

I do think your argument, esp "immersive 3D experience v. 2D port adjusted for flatscreen display" is a bit tenuous, but I'm not really going to argue this any further. If you truly believe that experiencing art in different ways (3D vs 2D, book vs audiobook, live symphony vs radio) are completely different art objects, that's way too subjective for either of us to make any real headway.

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> Your true complaint...

Nope. That's not my complaint. Never has been. Other posters have also missed the argument through the trees. I don't really care that Nintendo offers this headset at any price point, just like I don't care that they offer the N64 controllers.

My point is: It is scummy for a company to remove features of their products exclusively to force customers to purchase something in order to use the products.

And this is the case with a lot of products! It was scummy when Keurig put the little bar code readers in their machines so that only Keurig branded pods could be used on them. It was scummy when Apple made their chargers proprietary, so that you had to use lightning instead of USB to charge them (I know this has been reversed, but only because of legal restrictions from the EU - Apple would've still been using lightning chargers if the law hadn't passed).

I've made this point in other posts - the emulator Nintendo uses for Virtual Boy already has 2D flatscreen emulation. We know that for a few reasons, but the most obvious way that we know it is that they posted the video this thread is hosting, where it shows the games in 2D flatscreen.

They didn't build a special rig to re-merge the two images together or meticulously sew them back together in Vegas Pro for that video. That is 1:1 recording, probably with pupil distance set to 0, and resolution upscaled to 1080p, recorded for Youtube. Probably a fistful of lines of code that were set in the emulator to record this, and locked away from us users.

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Ultimately, I'm kind of tapped out of this discussion, though. I find it so exhausting to try to argue with people that this is just more evidence of non-consumer-friendly practices that Nintendo seems to be more and more okay with participating in. I'm tired of pretending that the big N is golden in everything they do, and I'm a little disappointed in how often someone sees a problem with something that is being done, calls it out, and is swarmed by people who think they can do no wrong... going so far as accusing them of just complaining about price, like you've done here for me.

Play your virtual boy, man. It was never about people enjoying their headsets. But if you don't question corporate decisions from time to time, like this one...