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Nov 18, 2008 04:32 PM | 15
It's been in stores for only one week, but Mirror's Edge (a first-person video game developed by Electronic Arts, Inc.) is apparently causing quite a stir. Literally. People playing the game have reported feeling dizzy and, in some cases, so nauseous that they vomit, writes Clive Thompson in his Wired.com blog, "Games without Frontiers."
Mirror's Edge, available for Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 (a PC version of Mirror’s Edge will ship in North America in January 2009), is set in a police state in the near future. The game has its players assume the persona of Faith, a courier whose mission is to deliver sensitive information, which requires a lot of leaping between rooftops to elude agents of the totalitarian government. Whereas many other first-person shooter games stabilize a player's vision as their characters perform, in Mirror's Edge, players can see their arms and legs pumping as they run, and their perspective is jostled when they jump, slide, fight or climb over obstacles. The action is reminiscent of Parkour, which involves a lot of running, hopping fences, climbing parking garages—anything to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. (Several examples are can be seen at the Parkour.tv Web site.)
Players may become queasy because of the game's ability to interfere with the body's "proprioception," which Thompson points out is "a fancy word for your body's sense of its own physicality—its 'map' of itself. Proprioception," he notes, "is how you know where your various body parts are—and what they're doing—even when you're not looking at them."
Mirror's Edge is designed with the "the correct kind of visual feedback (your limbs, in a fully interactive world) with the correct timing," Tom Stafford, a researcher and lecturer in the University of Sheffield's psychology department in the U.K., writes today in his "Mind Hacks" blog. The game hijacks one's sense of proprioception by remapping "your body schema so that you feel more fully that you are the character in the game," he adds. "When your character runs fast, you feel it is you running fast. When you character jumps across between two buildings and look down, you feel a moment of sickening vertigo." Mirror's Edge does this, he points out, not because of the game's level of graphic detail but rather because of the fluidity of the interaction between the game and the player.
(Image courtesy of EA)
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15 Comments
Add CommentFor more info on Parkour feel free to check out www.americanparkour.com which has tutorials and helpful forums.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe PC version won't sell as well as it should if EA continues to add DRM to its games... I know I won't purchase any of their games...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is slightly remisniscent of those old movie train things that they would show before playing a movie in theatres. Why create and sell it if it's going to make the public sick?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you are prone to motion sickness, virtually any first-person game will cause problems for you. This one is obviously over the top for the average person, but for the inner-ear impaired, there are tons of games that cause dizziness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am prone to sea sickness, but I can play the combat flight simulator games, but get motion sick right away with the ground based car driving games and all first person shooter games.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am also no longer buying EA games because of the SecurRom, which disabled my legally owned Roxio easy creator
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisno more Sims, no Spore, no more EA Games in my house
Army of Two was a good EA first person shooter. This will be one to at least check out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will never again buy an EA game... not when I can get the same game, but of better quality, through BitTorrent. As long as the pirates put out a better product than the developer, I'll go with the pirate!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJudging from your name, I guess you aren't much of a hardware guy... Rockin' the 360.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiscompletly agree with DonaldEdbru. since I am one of those people that gets motion sickness from playing games like gears of war. I once was sick and felt like vomiting for 3 days after playing a tomb raider game. and I can't play the game FEAR, although I absolutly love it. I can play it for 10-20 min after having to lie down in my bed and feel like absolute crap
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiscompletly agree with DonaldEdbru. since I am one of those people that gets motion sickness from playing games like gears of war. I once was sick and felt like vomiting for 3 days after playing a tomb raider game. and I can't play the game FEAR, although I absolutly love it. I can play it for 10-20 min after having to lie down in my bed and feel like absolute crap. I'm kindoff happy in a way that finally the average person can feel my pain and frustration
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt doesn't sound to me as if "realism" is necessarily involved with the nausea. I know that just watching video with too much "wobble" can cause me to feel sick. It doesn't matter whether or not the camera is being moved from location to location. Just the wobble itself makes me sick.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLove the game - but it is giving me motion sickness. I can only play for 20 minutes at a time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis game is fabulous, this is what we need in more video games of today. Because eventually one day all games will turn out like this one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to me that the motion sickness problem is obviously different for every person. I have had no problems playing Mirror's Edge other than the games actual story. It might be that I play FPS games often and I'm used to it.
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