Innovation and mechanics are not different things

I said in my earlier post about innovation and "Mirror's Edge" and that I wanted to see more critics engaging each others ideas and that's exactly what I got, albeit at a much more meta-level than I anticipated.

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal wrote a rejoinder to recent posts by yours truly (here and here), Leigh Alexander and the Guardian's Keith Stuart in which he gives a big fat "red light" to our arguments about videogame critics not valuing innovation enough, or in the right ways. And hey, just being the subject of a post by a veteran writer like Croal, let alone his triumphant return to blogging after several months away, is pretty cool.

But I think he gets something wrong. Or perhaps I didn't express myself well and he nailed me on it. Either way, I think my disagreement can be easily targeted at this snippet from his response:

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.

First of all, I agree with Croal. His critique very closely mirrors my largely negative review of the game. But I think it's a point in favor or my bigger picture argument, as well as the ones made by Leigh and Keith (Leigh and I are co-workers and friends, so I'll use her first name; in the case of Keith, I'm just being presumptious). Why? Because the first person POV, by and large, is the innovation. That's exactly how "Mirror's Edge" "simulated the experience of le parkour." The's the "movement," which Croal (I only know him very casually, and I'm kind of arguing with him, so I'll be more respectful) lists under "mechanics" along with shooting and combat. He appears to think that by criticizing the way the first person POV makes the game difficult to control, he's showing how a mechanic ruins the innovation. But in fact he's engaging with the big idea of the game, just as I argued critics should.

My point, which I'm sure I could have made more clearly and I gather, based on the response on her blog, Leigh agrees with, is that you have to prioritize your mechanics and other elements. A review of "Mirror's Edge" in which the shooting or story is weighed equally with the ways the game handles running and jumping at high speed through an environment is highly problematic. Sure, you can note that combat weak or that the story's generic (I did the latter in my review and didn't even bother with the combat). But trust me, if I found the parkour engaging and exhilirating, my review would have been much more positive, even if those other weaknesses remained. Too many reviews, I'm saying, don't focus enough on the big, new important elements of games. Instead they focus on the same list of attributes they always have.

To move the argument beyond "Mirror's Edge," I've been surprised to see how some (overall positive) reviews critized "Left 4 Dead" because the story is non-existent and a playthrough of the campaigns doesn't take too long. These are important elements in scripted single player games for sure. In a game that explicitly uses Hollywood cliches to immerse players in a world where dynamic enemy A.I. and co-op or competitive gameplay make for nearly endless opportunities for repeat gameplay, they hardly even seems worth mentioning. (For my take on "Left 4 Dead," you can read my new review here)

Of course, critics can argue about priorities. Maybe somebody strongly believes the brevity of the campaign really does matter in "Left 4 Dead." But you've got to make a case. When a game is innovating, you've got to really engage with the fresh mechanics/elements, or else try to demonstrate why they actually don't matter much. In the IGN review of "Mirror's Edge" that Stuart criticized, we've got the following, in order: an introduction, two paragraphs about the story, two paragraphs about the visual design, two paragraphs about parkour movement, one paragraph about combat, one paragraph about "runner vision," one  about the time trials, one about the graphics, one about the sound, and a conclusion. It's basically a checklist, in other words. That's the kidn of thing I find annoying, particularly for an innovative game that doesn't neatly fit the standard criteria.