Wednesday, November 12, 2008

OMG Mirror's Edge is coming out tomorrow!

I'm gonna get it I'm gonna get it. I AM GOING TO GET IT!



MY LITTLE MCM HEAD WILL EXPLODE FULL OF JOY AND GENDER THEORIZING GOODNESS!

So between my fever dream hallucinations, my split attention between various online convos, and my rushing to get this post in ASAP so I can meet the sweet warm embrace of sleep I just want to lay out what I'm expecting from Mirror's Edge in terms of thought food.

So to start with one interesting excerpt from a reviewer:

We see Faith in the third-person during the animated cut-scenes, and she always seems slightly unhappy and worried, weighed down by the sheer fact of being in her skin. Hers isn't the easiest life, and, while stationary, she has time to wonder about these things. When she's running, however, when we look at the world through her eyes, it all makes sense. As long as she can make the next jump, she'll be fine. If she can lose the police by sliding under a series of pipes and crashing through a door, she has fixed a very immediate problem. It's easy to live when your existence is counted a rooftop at a time; everything else falls away.
So the premise is that all the worlds information media is being tapped, regulated, and controlled etc. by an Evil totalitarian government, so it takes an organic human message carrier, free from the constraints of technology, to pass private messages across the city that would otherwise be intercepted by the police-state. I haven't gotten around to playing or seeing it yet, so this is all being gleaned from reviews and such I've read. Still, this much heavily intruiges me in that we've got a narrative contrast set up between technology, order, patriarchical society, and progress against the organic female body. An organic female body that serves as a space where the player's identity is projected onto, which is something that again resonates with a lot of writing about Cyborg theory and degendering (or transgendering) possibilities via technological extension. So does it make sense that Faith, in being presented in the 3rd person, feels uncomfortable as an object of the gaze, as an objectified fetish of pleasure in a cinematic cutscene? Only when the game jumps back into the "gamic" 1st person does everything make sense again, does she suddenly spring into action not as a cinematic object but as a gamic subject, one that is constantly moving and bounding through gamic space.

Here's a short quote from a 1-up review:
Mirror's Edge is ultimately a game about love, not violence -- and considering how refreshing it was to play from a first-person vantage point without the barrel of a gun bobbing along, I wanted to keep it that way as often as possible.
Again, just like Portal Mirror's Edge is a 1st person female game not about killing but space manipulation, reinforcing a trend that's happening in "feminized" hardcore 1st-person games. And I want to call Mirror's Edge a feminized game because that's what it seems to be, and I really hope it is because if it is as exciting and influential and innovative and ground breaking as I'm hoping it is, it'll push the industry into creating more thoughtful and sophisticated games in general. In the past 5-10 years in gaming it was the "casual games" that were marked as distinctly feminine, and both Mirror's Edge and Portal definitely fall in the "hardcore" realm. Does this mean that these games are encouraging more gender crossover into serious gaming, trying to unlabel itself off of being a "boys only" zone?

On another note, I'm troubled by the advertising of this game, with Faith being made into a sexual selling point. Portal didn't have Chell plastered across Orange Boxes everywhere, and the above image of Faith knocking out a stormtrooper is certainly not jumping away from all the typical male fantasy imagery floating around Lara Croft, Bloodrayne, or most 3rd-person action games with female protagonists. This seems to work against the work the actual game is doing in expanding on gender portrayals in games. Well, anything to sell it though, right?

More on when I actually get some game time with this little wonder.

No comments: