Ian Bogost wrote an analytical piece about Mirror's Edge for Gamasutra in which he describes the notion of games performing to the expectation of the player and how our expectations lead us on a false pretense about games.
Mirror's Edge presents its own take and view of the world and to apply everyday day logic, or commonly held gaming convention would dillute the message the developers were intending to deliver. He said :
Mirror's Edge deploys two main strategies to create the experience of fluidity. The first is its first-person perspective, an unusual, risky decision that alienates some players, those unable to get over the fact that Unreal Engine 3 would have afforded a more straightforward third-person viewpoint. The game would indeed probably have been easier to play with the camera locked behind its main character, Faith.
But the game's purpose was not to make movement predictable and easy -- to make it transparent, in the lingo of HCI. Rather, Mirror's Edge attempts to create a sense of vertigo which the player must constantly overcome in order to reorient Faith toward her next objective. The rewards for success are remarkable: running to a sprint and properly vaulting a fence produces a sense of physical mastery commensurate with the parkour expert.
This is how the developer's wanted players to experience the game. They wanted to deliver an experience that was unique and presented players with the attitude and point of view of a parkour artiste.
The second is its unusual level structure, one designed for difficulty. Mirror's Edge is a hard game; the number of times a player, even a good one, will fail is utterly enormous. When such failures occur, the game often asks the player to restart from a particularly punitive location, demanding that he work back to a point where, inevitably, he is likely once again to tumble violently down to earth.
Unlike Assassin's Creed, which adapts the fluidity of parkour by making movement consistently easy, Mirror's Edge adapts that fluidity by making it hard. But what initially seems like a punitive design gaffe actually carries a crucial payload: requiring the player to reattempt sets of runs insures that the final, successful one will be completed all in one go.
This is not the same type of frustration that one finds in Mega Man: the punitive levels are not conduits for final accomplishment and trophy, but for mastery over the very process of moving through the levels themselves.
There is a great sense of accomplishment with mastering a skill. It isn't about material rewards like points or gold coins but a mental reinforcement of how good you are. I think in this day and age of MMO's and competitive experienced based multiplayer games with numbers popping up to tell you how well you have done, gamers are forgetting to appreciate the less obvious rewards of games(which may be more fulfilling).
Mirror's Edge is not a perfect game, perhaps, but it is something more important: it is an interesting game. It can be played and experienced on its own terms, for its own sake, if players would only allow themselves to take a single videogame specimen at face value rather than as yet another data point on the endless trudge toward realistic perfection.
While Keith Stuart's rejoinder against meeting expectations does remind us that innovation offers an important avenue for creativity, to privilege experimentalism still implies a view toward titles of the future. We must stop looking at the games we make and play in terms of how well closely the vistas they open match the ones in our mind when we come to them.
Rather than seeing these works as mere toasters or word processors meant to deliver on our expectations while we await a better version to come along, we must begin to understand what a game can offer us today: how it can serve as a mirror that presents a new view of our own experience of the world, rather than as a window polished to an incrementally greater shine, facing that same green pasture of familiarity.
Which is a point I have often pondered about. What if games fail to meet our expectation on how something in it behaves? What if it defied commonly held game logic.I often found it entertaining to read about how gamers play games with a very methodical and almost perfectionist attitude.
What if a game behaved unpredictably? Games are not like a piece of software that are supposed to behave predictably for productivity purpose. Games are a form of expression of the developers.
Does all these mean they automatically make it a bad game. Do we judge a game based on our expectations based on our experience of playing other games or judge it based on its own merit?At least developers are trying to diversify form of experiences they want players to feel. That is a good thing.
When movie directors and book writers mess with our perceptions in their medium all the time, why can't games do the same? Which goes back to the article I wrote, Are games art? If we are to look at it at that, then we have to see them from its own perspective rather from a very mechanical aspect of gameplay dynamics.
Read the full article here : http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3890/persuasive_games_windows_and_.php
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