Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is full of spiders: monstrous, poison spiders, spiders that leap at your face, spiders that build city-sized nests in which they wrap up and devour their human prey.

These spiders terrified me. Despite knowing they weren’t really there, I felt uneasy when they were around and would lose my cool when they advanced on me. I wasted a lot of potions in my panicky desperation.

It’s just a game

Dark Messiah does a lot to encourage a sensual sort of immersion. Its settings are rich and colourful, blows from swords feel weighty, and there’s a nice meaty thump when you kick an orc in the chest—often off a cliff. (Their yells are satisfying too.)

The game also has many unreal elements. Equipment is represented as icons in a grid and has explicit attributes like +3 Damage. No matter how well you can sneak, if your player character hasn’t upgraded his Stealth skill, guards will spot him long before he can get behind them. And why are guards so often hanging out by racks of spikes and cliff edges anyway?

These arbitrary and artificial things work against the sense of being there supported by its clashing swords and pretty vistas. Thinking about skill points and armor classes draws the player out of the dungeon and into her computer chair, managing stats instead of impaling goblins. Well, you might think so.

It’s real to me, dammit

Dark Messiah‘s unreal elements (stats, inventory swapping) didn’t hold me back from dreading the spiders, though I was never unaware of them. I knew I was playing a game—I was constantly reminded by the interface, the click of my mouse, the cheesiness of Xana’s dialogue—but my reaction to the spiders was nonetheless a gut-level thrill.

“We really can’t differentiate between real and unreal images,” notes Chuck Klosterman.¹ “We can describe the difference, but we can’t manage it.”²

Humans have existed for 130 000 years. The Great Train Robbery was made in 1903. For roughly 129 900 years, any moving image a human saw was actually real. It was there, right in front of you. If a man in 1850 saw a train chugging toward his face, it was actually a train. For 129 900 years, we were conditioned to understand that seeing something in motion had a specific meaning. But that understanding no longer exists; today, we constantly “see things” that aren’t actually there.

I am struck by the idea that for all my understanding and all the game’s self-evident artificiality, I was still affected by the spiders. Once they were dead, I would quickly become conscious of the game, the system. Using potions to get rid of the annoying and overlong poison effect the spiders dealt me was never so natural that it felt part of the same reality in which giant spiders were attacking me.

It’s as if the sense of being there and the knowing of toying in a system were like a figure–ground illusion: I could see both, but never at the same time.

Maybe, or maybe I need to grow some balls and do something about my arachnophobia.

Mirror’s Edge, which I played through recently, provided me a patchy experience. It was sometimes thrilling, sometimes aggravating. In ways, Mirror’s Edge is its own worst enemy.

The most common actions of the game, running, climbing, and jumping, were great. The experience of free running through a modern city was sensational, in both senses of the word. I felt a rush when I managed to escape a dozen armed guards by running through an office building, vaulting over desks, then leaping out of a window onto another building’s roof.

There was a fluidity about doing these things, as if I were really pulling off something acrobatic. The lack of explicit health and speed meters and the presence of my character’s body—my hands would grab ledges, my fingers would push against walls, and when I looked down, I could see my feet, all while my character panted and gasped from exerting herself—reinforced my feeling of being in those places, of being a physical actor in that world.

When I carried out some clever combination of jumping and climbing to reach a distant catwalk, I felt as if I’d accomplished something. Sure, I was only pressing buttons on a gamepad, I was only following the paths created and allowed by the designers¹, but it was exciting, rewarding. In those moments, Mirror’s Edge was excellent.

Falling flat

In those moments, it was excellent—but not throughout. For each amazing run there were a half-dozen difficult obstacles or gaps that would bring the game to a sudden halt. For each puzzle there would be a frustrating fight sequence that required several playthroughs to memorize, optimize, and then, with luck, overcome. Flow turned to frustration as I was shot or plummeted to my death over and over and over again.

I know I’m not the best game player in the world (probably fourth- or fifth-best), so I expected to die a few times. Trouble was, I often didn’t feel responsible for my deaths. The obstacles, be they large gaps or police, appeared out of nowhere and took many attempts to get past. It felt unfair² and sudden. I had been running along well until I had to stop and fight through a dozen SWAT troops awkwardly, or have them shoot me to bits while I searched for that one way out. It was as if the designers were stuffing in infuriating play to break apart the thrill of parkour—exactly what is most enjoyable and original.

Story problems

I saw similarly harsh shifts in the way the game’s story was told. Some story sequences occurred in the game world and were told to me in the game, from my first-person perspective. These were okay. The majority, however, were presented in animated sequences that looked different from the world I was running through. The first-person, 3D, textured game world in which I could act would become a third-person, 2D, flat cartoon story world where I could do nothing but watch. The plot was divorced from game in perspective, presentation, and style, and these differences underscored just how irrelevant the story was to what I was doing in the game.

Faith, the character I played as, would visit places and interact with characters in the cutscenes that I never would truly interact with in the game. It was as if the storytellers were working on another game, parallel to the one I was playing, sometimes pulling me out of my body and making me watch the Erin eSurance commercials they’d made.

What confuses me further is that the game’s designers created this contrast purposefully. In an interview for Gamasutra, the game’s producer said,

We think it’s really cool the way you get glimpses of Faith in the game world: You see her in reflections, you see her in shadow, and I think that gives a really nice feel to the game. Obviously, in the storytelling we do, you see Faith, but we actually show her in a different way, so it’s 2D, more cartoon animation.

If glimpsing the character in the world gives the player a “nice feel,” why change that when telling the story?

We wanted people to take notice; we wanted people to look at the story, and understand the story, because that’s very important to us. We feel that you have a much stronger experience if you understand why, as you progress, and things change, and there are twists and turns.

It’s odd that they would want to point out how apart the story and game are. Rather than have it occur in the world of the player, as a consequence of the player’s actions, they set apart to be looked at and considered on its own. In my experience, the story did not motivate or reward me, it just filled the gaps in time and setting between levels.

An empty world

Though Mirror’s Edge communicated the sense of running across rooftops in a big city, I felt that the universe (characters, factions, history) in which it is set was not well established. The buildings are realized beautifully, but the city is not: there are almost no pedestrians and cars. The police are present on screen, but there’s no sense of the malicious surveillance and evil government that is to be behind them. I was told that times were rough, the the city had changed, but I spent the game running on shiny white rooftops or swinging from chrome flagpoles in a chic mall: it didn’t look so bad to me, just a little empty. Characters were introduced and suddenly of critical importance or killed off. Faith was supposed to be a member of a covert group of messengers, but I was only told who they were and what I did for them, I never did it myself—not that it mattered, as I was trying to clear the name of my sister, not save the city. (I ended up doing both!)

I think the game could’ve done with halving its cast, simplifying its plot, and showing (not merely telling) me who I was and why the city was so bad. A few early missions in which I would have had to have acted as a rebel messenger (perhaps take messages to political prisoners, or move a rebel’s supply of medicine of supplies from one cache to another) would likely have helped establish Faith, her world, and her cause. The game sped past this sort of tone-setting, motivational stuff, as if it assumed I was already aware of (and on board with) what my character did and why. In the game, I was a Person of Great Consequence without earning it, before I had a chance to understand how that was different from being Faith, parkour messenger.³ I was chased out of tutorial by gun-toting policemen, with only the narrator in my ear to explain why I thought it worth risking my life to go save some guy called Robert Pope.

Mirror-world Thief

I enjoyed Mirror’s Edge nonetheless because of the quality of the free running, wall climbing, and leaping shone through the frustration and story. Which brings me to Looking Glass’s Thief: The Dark Project.

Mirror’s Edge and Thief have a lot in common. They are both played from a first-person perspective, both are unusual in that they (arguably) don’t require the player to fight—they discourage the player from entering combat by make it difficult and close. Both take place, for the most part, in cities populated with few civilians, but many armed, semi-competent guards. Both convey the bulk of their narrative through animated, stylized cutscenes that come between missions. Lastly, Mirror’s Edge and Thief alike in that, despite identifying many shortcomings, despite being angered by the game for creating situations in which I failed again and again and again, I liked both games. I stopped playing out of frustration several times, I didn’t care much about the characters, but I genuinely enjoyed hiding from guards in Thief and jumping from rooftop to rooftop in Mirror’s Edge. Their mechanics—the verbs players use to describe their actions in the game—are what redeemed them⁴.

The nature of these mechanics (slow sneaking in Thief, speedy acrobatics in Mirror’s Edge), and the contexts in which players carry them out (Thief‘s dark, early industrial, somewhat medieval setting; the sunny, modern, near-future city in Mirror’s Edge) are almost entirely contrary, but, in essence, the games are alike: they both make it fun to get from point A to point B, without fighting (too much), by taking advantage of the environment and the player character’s skills.

So it is that I feel, as do many others, that the designers could improve Mirror’s Edge by admitting that the game is an exciting platformer and encourage players to run, climb, and jump over stuff, instead of hampering them with awkward combat or forcing things into a complicated and irrelevant story.

Thief: The Dark Project came under similar criticism for having players fight through zombie-filled catacombs rather than stick to sneaking. Its developers understood this, and, in the sequel, Thief II: The Metal Age, created a world challenged the player to do what made Thief unique and exciting: break in, sneak around, and steal stuff.

Likewise, the developers of Mirror’s Edge are now selling a set of environments designed to the strengths of the game.⁵ This makes me think that I would play through a sequel to Mirror’s Edge. The core of Mirror’s Edge is great, its faults are remediable, and its creators seem to know what they are.

To me, the key difference between first-person games on PCs and consoles are the control schemes, how they map from intentions (move forward) to player actions (press W), and how the buttons, sticks, and etc. interact with the player’s body.

For example, keyboard control requires coordination of multiple fingers for diagonal motion (e.g. hold W and A), whereas analog controls have a more direct mapping of intention to action (the movement vector is the angle and direction of the stick from the centre).

Speed is also different. In Thief, the player using a keyboard has to toggle between discrete sneaking and running modes: there are only two speeds. On the console, the player has direct, analog control of their character’s speed: it’s up to the player how fast or how slow to move.

The keyboard also has a greater management cost: the player has to remember stuff like the keys to toggle modes, the mode she’s in, and has to coordinate two or three simultaneous actions across two or three fingers.

I think in these two examples, dual analog controls are less abstract and more closely related to what the player is trying to achieve in the game world than are keyboard controls. This might be why some players find it easier to pick up and learn console games.

That said, analog sticks are controlled by thumbs—they’re literally “all thumbs.” With the mouse, motion comes from wrist and arm movements. With the mouse, gross movements are easier to make (arm) and fine ones too (wrist, slow movement). Thumbs aren’t as capable as arms and wrists, and that makes the tradeoff between accuracy and speed harder to adapt during play.

The mouse is also not bound by an arbitrary magnitude as are analog sticks (which the player can only push so far). Instead, mouses are limited (at most) by the physical range of the player’s arm (or the mouse wire): I can move it almost as far and as fast as I can. This means that, in theory, I can whip around much faster in Quake, and snipe more effectively in Team Fortress, with a mouse than with analog sticks.

But, in practice, I suck at Halo and Team Fortress, mouse or gamepad.