Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss, edited by Level Up

The Idea: Game reviewers and game players get so hung up on minutiae-i.e. game controls and combat systems-that too often, they miss what's important and innovative about games. This in turn creates a culture where gamers are searching for aspects of a game to dislike. Instead, what's needed are more critics and gamers who champion particular developers and games.

The Thinkers: Leigh Alexander, Ben Fritz, Keith Stuart

The Sources: Sexy Videogameland, The Cut Scene, Games Blog

The Quotes:

When a title attempts to explore uncharted areas, it risks stumbling into areas that have been neglected for a good reason--because they don't work as well. But when we fault them for trying, without recognizing that the game might have done a few new things well, or when we treat creativity or an attempt at inventiveness as a design flaw, we're sending the industry some problematic mixed messages. We demand innovation and invention, and then we crucify any attempts in that direction.
--Leigh Alexander, Sexy Videogameland

[I]n the case of games that are different in some way (like a new IP, or a sequel from a new developer as in the case of "Silent Hill: Homecoming"), a lot of videogame critics obsess about the small stuff because they don't like the big picture....If we re-arranged our priorities, I think we'd have more critics "championing" certain games or developers. In the end, that's what I'm calling for and I think that's what Leigh's implying. In the film world, there were critics who championed the then-radical filmmakers of the '70s who transformed the world of cinema. Wouldn't it be great if there were more videogame critics who championed certain titles or artists, while acknowledging their imperfections, the way Leigh does "Silent Hill: Homecoming" and Hideo Kojima?
--Ben Fritz, The Cut Scene

[I]f it were a movie, Mirror's Edge would be critically lauded by the specialist film press--it would be considered a forward-thinking masterpiece. Sure, it's dangerous to compare two such different media, but there are key similarities--one is the way in which critics should be able to deconstruct the experience on offer and draw from it undeniable values that outweigh concerns about basic construction. For example, no-one complains that, say, Pan's Labyrinth or Eraser Head lack the formal, easily recognisable narrative structure of a conventional movie. Their aspirations exempt them from that requirement. So should we really be marking Mirror's Edge down for control issues--a game that aspires to re-interpret the very interface between player, screen and character? Yes, I know, it's a clumsy comparison, but the underlying point is--should reviewers just accept that sometimes incredibly new experiences will lack some of the formal substance we expect from traditional games? That's what innovation is, it's leaping out into the unknown.
--Keith Stuart, Games Blog

The Reaction: Personal tastes aside, we don't buy the argument that the nature or the amount of innovation in a game should exempt it from criticism in other areas that determine how a reviewer or critic evaluates a game's quality. Portal was plenty innovative, and it has a 90 Metacritic score. Ditto for LittleBigPlanet with its Metacritic rating of 95. For a game whose mechanics vary from the norm as much as does Mirror's Edge, its Metacritic rating of 79 strikes us as not only fair, but also a bit high (Nintendo's at-least-as-original game Wii Music, by contrast, is languishing at a Metacritic score of 62), in a way that suggests that DICE's first-person parkour game benefited rather than lost points for its innovation. Allow us to elaborate.

From where we sit, the core mechanics of Mirror's Edge--the locomotion, or movement, of the main character--are exceedingly well implemented. The same is true for the twinning of the player and the camera. The shooting mechanics, however, are shockingly mediocre for a studio whose history and expertise lie in first-person shooters. As for the hand-to-hand combat, it's certainly well-animated and pleasing to the eye. Yet it's also both perfunctory and unforgiving, which means that it's somewhat satisfying when you get it right and thoroughly irritating when you get it wrong.

Stuart and Alexander would have us believe that the fault lies with reviewers and gamers who have disparaged any of the game's mechanics--movement, shooting or hand-to-hand combat--while being insufficiently laudatory of the breathtaking way Mirror's Edge simulates the experience of le parkour. They're wrong and, if we can turn back a phrase from Fritz, they're wrong in a way that misses the big picture. Because while the locomotion in Mirror's Edge is praiseworthy and innovative, the game it's wrapped it not only fails to amplify and focus said innovation, the game by and large works against it.

What do we mean by this? Mirror's Edge, far more so than traditional platformers, is at its most exhilarating whenever you achieve an unbroken chain of continuous motion. But because it uses a first-person camera, it drastically reduces your situational awareness as compared to a third-person camera system. That fact, combined with the need to create varied, challenging gameplay scenarios, results in a good deal of trial-and-error--which is precisely the opposite of Mirror's Edge at its most exciting. Why? Because it breaks the flow and grinds the action to a halt.

Imagine if after crashing in a Burnout Paradise race, the developers started you over at a standstill rather than already in motion, and you'll have a sense of how dissatisfying failure feels in Mirror's Edge. Stuart, for his part, says that there's just a "smattering of trial-and-error moments," which we'll graciously chalk up to the superiority of his gaming skills over our own. Still, the effect of this marrying classic try, die and retry failure states to a trickier-than-usual platformer is to create an experience that continuously alternates between elation and frustration, which steadily erodes the sensation that DICE comes so tantalizingly close to imparting.

This is why the most satisfying portion by far of Mirror's Edge is the Time Trials. In this mode, you not only expect trial-and-error, you embrace it, because you're trying to improve your time. And by taking manageable portions of each level and isolating them to serve as Time Trials, you get to know each mini-level well enough that you can successfully maintain the unbroken chain of continuous motion that is the best thing about Mirror's Edge. Even within an individual run, there's still exploration, but it's highly focused on looking for an aspect of the environment that you hadn't seen previously, an alternate route that you'd missed, all in hopes of reducing the time that it takes to get from beginning to end. Forget Madden NFL or NBA 2K: this is the first game that we genuinely makes us feel like an athlete when we play it. That's when it's firing on all cylinders, however, and more often than it should, the Mirror's Edge story mode you feels like you're shooting blanks.

A number of reviewers have likened Mirror's Edge to Portal. It's an apt comparison: both are first-person games that radically innovate on how players can traverse from Point A to Point B; both games contain movement, platforming, exploration and combat challenges. Yet the differences between the two are ultimately more instructive than their similarities. Portal, at its core, is about solving environmental puzzles in order to get somewhere. Mirror's Edge, by contrast, is about solving environmental puzzles at top speed in order to get somewhere as quickly as possible. (Yes, there are a number of momentum-based obstacles in Portal, but the game is nowhere nearly as dependent on continuous movement for its pleasures as is Mirror's Edge.) The paradox is that while most story-based games rely on forward progression (shuttling you from new environment to new environment) Mirror's Edge is at its most alive in its circular progression (when you replay an environment that you're already familiar with), something which, on your first playthrough, only happens after you fail. That's not an easy tension to resolve, and it hasn't been resolved.

The tragedy here is that in the development time allotted, neither DICE nor its masters at Electronic Arts HQ were able to do what Valve did a year ago: figure out how to take the essence of Mirror's Edge and turn it into a game that could be sold for $60. Sure, Valve placed Portal in the tender, nurturing embrace of Half-Life Episode 2: The Orange Box, but it also married the innovative portal gun gameplay mechanics to a narrative structure, enemy placement and level designs that connected its 19 discrete puzzle sequences in a way that felt the whole felt greater than the sum of its parts. Mirror's Edge does not, and that's what is being reflected in its reviews. As Penny Arcade's Tycho put it, "The main problem is that I love what they've done with the art and with the style of play, but when they start hounding me with these snipers and S.W.A.T. motherf---ers it quickly becomes a game I don't want. I guess the idea is to make it more exciting, but I was already having fun."

This is, of course, merely one blog's opinion. But we opine in order to point out that while our fellow critics Alexander, Fritz and Stuart are undoubtedly well-intentioned, we'd prefer that they simply make the case for the aspects of various titles they find worthy rather than attempt to police the discourse surrounding said games. Criticism isn't crucifixion. Championing is great--it's one of this generation's must-try titles; we urge anyone reading this to at least try the demo; and we suggest that EA at some point decouple the Time Trial demo from the exclusivity arrangements with various retailers--but praising the praiseworthy aspects and criticizing the failed ones is better. And Mirror's Edge isn't a masterpiece--it's laudable but profoundly flawed--nor would its equivalent be widely considered so in any other medium. Because for the discerning critic, regardless of the medium being critiqued, both execution and innovation matter. The fact that Mirror's Edge, by our lights, excels at innovation but falls short on execution does not and should not render it immune from the criticism it's received.

One more point. In response the IGN UK review of Mirror's Edge which states "The ideas are there for a very cool experience, and I truly hope that a sequel is spawned, but this first attempt falls just a bit short," the Guardian's Stuart replies:

The 'better sequel' mentality is damaging both to the games industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital way. I don't want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then I'm willing to blunder through if I'm going to get an experience I never had before. I felt the same about Killer 7 and Shenmue and the mobile game, Nom - flawed every one of them, but I don't begrudge the creators a single second of the time I spent toiling with imperfections.

Similarly, in a Sexy Videogameland post that went live after the one we cited above, Alexander writes:

[A] main reason that this *** obsession on hardcore mechanical issues bothers me is also that it illustrates the massive divide between "us" -- the sort of folk that play a lot of games, immerse ourselves in the culture around games, and read blogs like Sexy Videogameland -- and your average consumer, who when playing Mirror's Edge would probably be unlikely to notice the same things you do, and who may actually (gasp) be more interested in something different than something perfect. The IGN review of Mirror's Edge, for example, would not only be impenetrable to the average gamer, but it would also not necessarily predict his or her experience.

While taking issue with Stuart's claim that Mirror's Edge is a masterpiece, Variety's Fritz, in a post that went live as we were penning this screed, goes even further in lambasting the IGN reviewer for even bringing up the prospect that a sequel could solve what ails Mirror's Edge. He states:

What I think we both dislike is the cowardly critic, the one who focuses on the details and refuses to engage with the big picture ideas of the game....On the one hand, it's kind of a dismal acceptance of reality--we all know there probably will be a sequel and EA/Dice probably will address specific issues. But that's hardly the most interesting thing about "Mirror's Edge," love it or hate it. This game made some very high level choices and those are what reviewers should be engaging.

First, Fritz's complaint doesn't quite square with the review, which tackles a big picture idea when the reviewer states that there's a conflict between the openness of the player's abilities and the sectioned off nature of the world. (You can read the review for yourself here.) Second, we hate to drag out our old chestnut of a quote, but we'll do it yet again nonetheless: We see games with our hands. In other words, not only do mechanics matter (why else would there be a minor civil war between those who think the floaty physics-based platforming in LittleBigPlanet is A-OK and those who believe that it renders the game unplayable?) but mechanics are also improvable, both between franchises (the cover system innovated in Kill.Switch but significantly improved in Gears of War) and within the same series (the cover system as built for the original Gears of War and as subsequently enhanced for Gears of War 2). To pretend otherwise is to miss a fundamental aspect of what games are and how sequels, downloadable content and expansion packs can function in this medium. To let the tastes of less knowledgeable gamers dictate the dialogue among those who are more fluent in this burgeoning critical language is to neuter the conversation. Let's avoid doing either.