Mirror's Edge Promotional Media Sparks Divison

Ryan,

Yes, the game performs much like Doom, and most other first-person [shooter] games for that matter, except gunplay is mostly replaced with acrobatics, like those seen in Casino Royale's chase scene.

Unlike most 1st person games of generations gone by, current gen hardware allows for realtime reflective surfaces. With the game taking place in a clean, pristine utopia (covering seedy government evil doings), the game features plenty of glass skyscrapers. When in real-time, the player can view themselves as Faith via reflections.

Outside of in-game action/cutscenes, the game also employs third-person animated cutscenes between gameplay chapters that take on a slight artistic deviation from the in-game vision, but retain most of the same qualities albeit stylistic cartoony CG.

But everyone's most common view of Faith came via EA's massive ad campaign. EA, now the second largest video game publisher in the world thanks to the Activision-Blizzard-Vivendi Universal merger, threw a great deal of money into the game's promotion hoping to create interest in the new IP (sidenote: EA gave much more promotion to Mirror's Edge than Dead Space, yet DS was a much larger commercial and critical success by far). Wanting to keep the game's unique premise (1st-person free running) under wraps until closer to the games release, many gamers' only connection to ME was promo art and in-game shots of Faith herself. Actual video from the 1st-person perspective wasn't released until May of this year, 2008. Pretty late to the game (reminds me of Nintendo).

For many gamers, Faith was Mirror's Edge. And the controversy started accordingly.

The controversy's roots are firmly established in video games general role of women as sex objects. Video games being stereotypically male FUBU (for us by us), female character designs have become increasingly err.... eyebrow raising to the point of absurdity. See: Here & Here. I enjoy boobs as much as the next guy, but it's reaching the point where I find myself near embarrassed to be a gamer. I'm not alone in my opinion, but most arguments about over-the-top, oversexed female design usually devolve into trolling with such rhetoric as "lol, ur gay".

Venturing into the "Oooh, shit! I shouldn't be here!" realm, there's a series of Nintendo DS games that have you investigating witchcraft at a school. In order to out the witches, you have to use the stylus to touch/rub the jail bait witches. I'll leave the areas to be "investigated" up to the imagination.

Really, it seems that a portion of gamers and video game designers/publishers have pushed female character design into palm face FetishLand. Worse, these games DO sell. Very well. With video games becoming much more expensive to develop, promote, and ship due to the massive expansion of the industry, many companies need a "sure hit" to survive and others just want to play it safe. Enter boobs. It sells.

Thankfully, not every company falls into this trend. Nintendo is typicallyconservative of its female characters (here & here), focusing more on game play/design, and their respective games still sell. Valve's Half Life 2 set a new standard for character depth with a female who was very attractive while still being down-to-Earth and normally proportioned. DICE deserves props as well for employing the use of a female that doesn't wrongfully distract from the game. Nod to EA for financing DICE's vision without pressure for change.

As for Mirror's Edge, the final retail product, I have not yet purchased it, though I am still intrigued. I downloaded a playable demo of it a while back and was left impressed. When the price dips, I'll probably take the blue pill.

[...and this is how I open 2009]