Viewing Post from Tuesday Dec 23, 2008
The Mirror's Edge Experience
Gamasutra has
a very interesting articlethat compares the parkour experience of Mirror's Edge with Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala's idea that software should explore ideas rather than to serve as tools.
Mirror's Edge is a game about another way of looking. It asks the player to see a credible, familiar world filled with cars, machines, hallways, and buildings in a different light. Each surface becomes a potential affordance for movement, and the player must learn to see fences, forklifts, ledges, and subway cars as tools of locomotion rather than as objects of industry.
The game's promising, if slapdash, dystopic fiction offers an entry into this practice, by persuading the player that the city is encumbered with a classic appearance-versus-reality problem. Visually, the game brings about this means of looking by literally whitewashing as much of the environment as possible, such that its surfaces reveal very little. The fact that nearly everything is white -- including the plants -- acts as a perceptual reset.