No, seriously, take a minute to think about it. Pour yourself a stiff drink or brew up a nice cuppa tea, put on your thinking cap and try to summarize your conclusion in a single sentence. It’s a peculiar question, really. I found myself trying to answer it late last night after spending some time with Mirror’s Edge. DICE’s platformer shares a lot of the same fundamentals as good ol’ SMB and, concerning the question at hand, both are fun for similar reasons. Super Mario Bros. lets you go wild on a playground where the laws of gravity are paying only loose attention and injury is not a threat. You can run and jump to your heart’s content, and if you see something, like a shiny coin or glowing box that might hide unknown treats, you can hit it with your fist and never worry about bloodied knuckles. Super Mario Bros. is fun because running and jumping, whether in real life or on a screen, is fun, and it’s this maxim that’s fueled platforming as a genre for twenty-five years. But the greatest platformers, the Marios and the Mega Mans, owe their success to more than just running and jumping. They also let you change their world. In Mario, especially in later series entries that allowed flight, crushing bricks opens new ways to move through the Mushroom Kingdom’s surreal landscapes. Mega Man has to destroy robots to ensure safe landings after a jump. If jumping and running was all you did in Jon Blow’s Braid, it could barely be called a game at all.
When you settle into Mirror’s Edge, when you trust yourself to move through the level properly and let DICE’s carefully laid out obstacle courses subtly guide you, it manages to transcend the natural abstraction that comes from making things on TV move. It is physically and mentally affecting. It is fun. But, and mind you I’ve only played the first three levels of the game, all you do is run, jump, and climb.
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