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(This article is a repost from my personal blog at www.gamearch.com)
A couple months ago I began playing Mirror's Edge. In the game you play Faith, an underground courier trying to uncover a conspiracy. A feature of the game is that you can finish it without shooting a single opponent. Motivated by this achievement and the challenge of doing so I decided to try and complete the game peacefully.
Well as peacefully as I could at least. There's still a lot of enemies, mostly policemen, which Faith has to take down to continue. I restricted myself to fighting unarmed and even though I struggled I greatly enjoyed the experience and felt immersed. I guess playing peaceful, as was in tune with my version of Faith's personality, helped me get into character.
In fact I emphasized so well with Faith that I was genuinely unsettled when at one point in the game I kicked an approaching cop and threw him off a roof. I had tried not to hurt someone and still it had happened. The game makes no distinction here and I was still well on my way to get the achievement but the death of the policeman was still an accident that had a much stronger emotional impact on me than the many other deaths in other games.
And again, later in the game I felt this immersion rear it's head - and bump it against something. At one point Faith has to ambush a convoy and to do so her courier organisation supplies her with a high powered sniper rifle to do so. Wait, what? How the hell did the peaceful group of free runners get their hands on such a weapon? I don't know why but I felt somewhat betrayed by and doubted the sincerity of the group. Who knows what I had transported accross the city before. Maybe I had become an unwitting party to weapons smuggling and terrorism?
This was a very odd feeling because I do not think there was any developer intent behind this: The group displays no nefarious ulterior motives during the story and most of it's members (of the few you meet) are genuinely good guys. If it was intentional and would actually lead somewhere in the story, then it would have been a powerful but subtle method to communicate parts of the narrative. Maybe foreshadow a possible betrayal or deeper corruption.
However as it was, Faith still cooperated with her group normally as if nothing had happened. This is where Faith as portrayed by the game, and as visualized in my head, diverged and my immersion suffered a few cracks.
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I just might make it a point to pick this title up, though. Thanks for the good article!
Because shooting people in the head from a hidden position is always good fun, right? Right?
Also with respect to "How the hell did the peaceful group of free runners get their hands on such a weapon?", it is quite simple, throughout the game you have many opportunities to disarm people so it also isn't a stretch that some of the runners could have gotten their hands on a sniper rifle while disarming someone in a previous mission.
I think it's at that point that the game gets really realistic. Sometimes in life there are times when you have no other option but "to go to the dark side". Make a resolution not to tell a single lie for a week and trust me you are presented with a situation where you will have to. And it goes to show that some times what makes one "evil" is not that they choose to be but because they have to be.
I love it when people create their own experiences from the core gameplay that is layed out. However not everyone tries to do so. I think we as developers should try to incorporate some amount of leeway to allow players create their own experiences rather than punish them for trying to.
As far as some of the comments go:
@B N
Yes, it could well be rationalized that the group has access to weapons, but the fact that they incorporate weapons into their plans without any second thoughts just was jarring to my sense of immersion. I'm just recounting a personal experience here so other people might very well feel differently.
@Adam Bishop and Nana Koduah:
I think that part of what made the immersion stronger for me was that it was a viable choice. I had the choice to shoot. In fact it might have even been the easier way at some parts of the game. There were sections (especially the stairwell just after that sniper sequence) that I played at least 50 times until I got through them. But that's part of it. I didn't waver. I stuck by my decision and that made it weigh a lot more. I didn't just press a button and something happened to someone in the game - I decided (outside of the game) and I struggled for it.
Mirror's Edge is a great game for giving me that choice. Granted the often leveled criticism of them not really going through with it by forcing you to confront a lot of cops holds true but I still enjoyed the game. Even though I ended up not getting the achievement because I accidentially once shot someone (which made me feel bad again). I disarmed a cop and then wanted to kick him and forgot that I still held the gun.
I agree. The subtle effect I felt at the Sniping sequence would have been masterful, if it was actually a part of the story. I think it's a great craft if you can tell parts of a story without spelling it all out.
I don't think the game got "realistic" at that point (I don't consider a courier taking out large groups of armoured police to be realistic), but even if it was, that's not the point. To me, that was the point at which the game stopped doing what it did really well (provide a sense of speed and travel) and started doing something it didn't do well at all (become a corridor shooter). There are already hundreds of games where shooting or stabbing things is the best option; I'd like to see a few more games that emphasise it less.
@Martin
I also felt a sense of guilt the first time I killed a guard (by inadvertently knocking them off a building, as you had). However, when I started to die repeatedly, as you did, once confronted with seemingly insurmountable odds, I stopped worrying about it, because the game had changed. By failing over and over again, the game was telling me "if you're not violent, this isn't really going to work". I'm quite interested in narrative in games. If I have to die 50 times to accomplish something, then the game is telling me that that character, in that particular place and time, would not have been able to accomplish that. So it felt like the game was really reinforcing the "you must shoot things" angle.
I see that, and I have another complimentary story on this topic I'll write up later this week. Another game, a similar experience than yours. Playing Mirror's Edge though I didn't give up. It didn't feel like the game FORCED me to give up being peaceful, it was just a really tough, really frustrating challenge. I could do it, and I did it. As mentioned, it was not entirely a pleasant experience but it made me feel that not shooting anyone is hard. I took the hard route and I suffered. Which made my choice even more memorable.
Also guns isn't the easiest way through the game either. If you learn to think like a runner there is always a more efficient route that you can take without dying to gunfire. If you approach it like other games and don't use the wall climbing and jumping abilities given to you and you don't keep your momentum up then you might face spots where it appears gunfire is your best option.
I respectfully disagree: I believe there are some sections that are vastly easier when using guns than when not using them. Still I think this is somewhat beside the point since this wasn't really supposed to be a review of the game but rather a recounting of my personal experience.
Which is where I come to your other argument. Granted, the mission is different but even with that in mind it was jarring to me that the group suddenly had a Sniper Rifle all ready and in place for me and they already knew what to do. Which just seemed "out of character" for such an organisation. At least to me.
I thought your issue was with the actual usage of the gun, and I think the scenario of having to save your sister is enough explanation for drastic measures.
Also I don't think Faith has any real issue with killing, that doesn't strike me as her character, she strikes me as more of a survivor, willing to do as she needs to do and making best use of her mobility, if a gun is available and the best option at the time she'd use it, but she wouldn't stop to fight with a gun, that's not her character. Also as far as I can remember, she doesn't kill anyone in the sniper scene, all you do is take out the car's engine.
It also seems to be fairly in keeping with an underground network to have what you need where your going to need it. I'm also constantly brought back to the concept of compartmentalisation. Underground networks, criminal groups and other groups requiring some sort of secrecy often rely on not telling everyone everything. Someone undoubtedly would have found out about the car's route without knowing why, someone else put the rifle there without knowing why, and then you arrived without realising there was going to be a rifle and there was and you were told what to do once you were there. They also don't strike me as a passive organisation, they're quite the, "whatever it takes to get the job done" kind of people, delivery by necessity means some sort of secrecy, and guns and dead bodies don't aid that hence their aversion to them, but I imagine, much as B.N suggests, if your actively going to assault a place for a rescue, they'd be fully prepared to do as they must.
See this is were our internal pictures of the characters and the world diverge.
Your interpretation is as valid as mine and I can totally understand the arguments for why things happened the way they did. It just didn't FEEL that way to me, which is what this blog post is about. And this was a very interesting experience for me.
It is interesting though and is representative of an issue designers of all kinds face. I suspect the designers and writers of Faith obviously had their own shared vision of the world and how Faith is meant to act and react in it. Yet you developed your own connection with her, how she reacts in your own model of Faith and her world. I guess something like this is an inevitability where "out-of-character" actions can occur in the player model but not in the designers model.
In some regards the divergence of the two models can be a success on the part of the designers, they have made us attached to that world to an extent that we can imagine much more than what they gave us.
I do hope in the sequel though that they do fix up the combat mechanics, and rethink the presentation of the story, those broke immersion for me especially.
http://gamearch.com/2009/06/27/no-unjustified-murder/
And that's fair enough, I just find that I could never wrap my head around Faith being non-violent. From the get go I found her to be characterised as quite violent, the runners are trained to fight and she has a chip on her shoulder, only made worse by the framing of her sis. I found myself thinking of the police more as hindrances, as my enemy, that if one got in my way I'd make him pay, it was a sort of righteous justice thing I felt Faith had going for her.
I'm not criticising your view in truth, merely sharing my own, but with this mind set I never once lost that sense of immersion, and played the game through in a single sitting =D