I don’t know how to dance, but I’ve been learning tai chi. To an onlooker, I suppose tai chi looks a bit like dance, though it’s technically a martial art. The principles are the same: you memorise a sequence of motions and perform them to a rhythm – sometimes with music, though doing so isn’t necessary. Each to their own tastes of course, but the end result isn’t what I’d call thrilling to watch – I find it resembles something like a war dance performed underwater. Gentle, slow and meditative, the average tai chi routine isn’t the kind of thing you’d break out in club. Rather, tai chi is a dance you perform for yourself. Sure, it has exhibitory qualities, but the real value of tai chi is the experience of performing it: the sense of calm, concentration and fulfilment derived from correctly and fluidly transitioning between each pose; the bodily pleasure of maintaining an even balance and momentum, of being acutely aware and in control of your presence and movement within a space. Tai chi turns even a task as mundane as walking into full-body experience. Much more than just moving your feet, doing the tai chi walk (to “walk like a tiger”, as my instructor calls it) means rotating your body from the hips, keeping an active posture and carefully redistributing your weight so as to take each step without a sound.
In many ways, videogames are another a kind of dance we perform for ourselves. I’m thinking here of one game in particular: not Dance Central, or Dance Dance Revolution, or even Space Channel 5, but DICE’s critically decisive, unlikely cult favourite Mirror’s Edge. In Mirror’s Edge, raw movement is it’s own reward. In Mirror’s Edge, the player can derive considerable enjoyment from simply navigating the environment with poise and panache. Forget scores, objectives, checkpoints, achievements or collectables. In this major studio anomaly from late 2000s – when experimentation was still viable in blockbuster productions and EA, of all companies, was leading the crusade – simply getting from A to B is a joy in and of itself. Skilled traversal is a dense and complicated recital consisting of umpteen discrete actions which must be rehearsed, memorised and then strung together, each executed with precise finger movements and exact timing. Mirror’s Edge is a videogame performed as dance.
To play Mirror’s Edge is to be a choreographer. An action game centred around the discipline of fast-paced, gymnastics-informed urban navigation called parkour, skilful play in Mirror’s Edge depends not only on performing standard actions like jumps, slides and rolls competently (that is, with a good aim and keen sense of timing) but also upon how the player arranges those movements. When it comes to high-level play, composing an efficient routine is just as important carrying it out, and practicing that routine over and over until you can pull it off flawlessly is where the game offers its deepest satisfaction. But that fact isn’t evident right away.
The standard game mode in Mirror’s Edge is your typical big-budget affair, meaning it consists of 6-hour long “campaign” divided into discrete, scripted levels in which the goal is to get from one end to the other: jump some gaps, punch some bad guys; job done. Though decidedly linear, the game’s environments are littered obstacles of all shapes and sizes, so navigating them can be little tricky on a first playthrough. To compensate, the designers to included a handy guidance feature which turns important objects like railings, poles and doors post-box red as you approach them, highlighting a clear path through the rooftop melange. Spend any amount of time in the game’s time trial mode, however, and you’ll soon learn that these prescribed routes are far from efficient. Before long you’ll be carving your own trails, springing from walls instead of climbing drain pipes, shaving off a few seconds here and there by vaulting fences and slipping under pipes you’d previously avoided or passed around.
It’s true that there’s still a great deal of direction going on on behalf of the designers, even when you break away from the suggested track – indeed, attaining a top rating on many of the time trial stages is often a case of discovering the subtle alternative trails cleverly embedded inside the orthodox route. Yet, as many a speedrun video can attest, there’s still plenty of wiggle room left for personal discretion. The more you play Mirror’s Edge, the more you really do become a parkour choreographer agonising over your routine. You find yourself honing that routine through trial and error until you land upon that sublime sequence of actions that gets you in under the target time with whole seconds to spare, every movement dissolving fluently into the next, not an ounce of momentum wasted.
I wrote earlier that when you do tai chi, you’re cognizant of every twitch and tremble, suddenly hyperaware of muscles you didn’t even know existed. Of course, that’s only true for so long. After enough repetition, instinct kicks in, and what you’re left with just a calm contentedness – the colours of the room around you; the sounds of your breathing. This, I guess, is the Zen component of tai chi.
If you take notion to run through one of Mirror’s Edge’s campaign levels after putting a decent chunk of time into the time trial challenges, you’ll encounter a similar sensation. The trail stages are composed of short extracts from the larger levels, maybe a minute or two’s worth of content from somewhere in the middle. As such, when you do decide to replay a whole level from the start, now and again you’ll encounter these familiar slices that are burned into your brain. Before you know it you’re going through the motions, rattling off each step just like you rehearsed.
And I guess this is the lesson that Mirror’s Edge has to teach us about choreography. It’s an obvious one, but valuable nonetheless; to get all Motorcycle Maintenance on you here, choreography reminds us that all things, no matter how fluid and pretty as a whole, consist of individual parts that can be studied, rehearsed and mastered, and that no matter how daunting or unattainable that contiguous whole might seem – be it a dance routine or any other task – if attended to one step at time, patiently and meticulously, it can be achieved. You stop worrying about each individual step and just live it.
This post is my second contribution to “Blogs of the Round Table”, a monthly community writing exercise organised the smooth operators at Critical Distance. If you’re looking for top notch game’s criticism, they’ve got you covered.
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