Mirror’s Edge and The Landscape of Sound
[Transcript]
Critical Swtich is a Games Criticism Audio Show where Austin Howe and Zolani Stewart discuss digital games and art. If you want to help keep this show going, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/criticalswitch, and you can also share this with others on the internet and get others listening to this show.
Today, I want try something a little different. I want to talk about sound, and to do that I want to spend some time, just listening to a game being played. Today that game is Mirror’s Edge for the Playstation 3, came out in 2008. As far as I’m concerned it is a classic, one of the most important videogames of the 2000s, bar none. We’re going to just listen to some recorded sessions of the game, and just talk about some of the really interesting intricacies and patterns that we hear. So let’s do that now, let’s try this out:
Mirror’s Edge is a game that helps us articulate what I like to call the Landscape of Sound. And landscapes are good metaphors because the landscape is understood as something which extends into this endless horizon. In Renaissance Italy, during the 15th Century, the landscape was considered lowly by the academic painting community, because it didn’t center figures. It wasn’t centering people as it was things like woodlands and natural scapes, and as such they were seen as mindless, exotic pleasures more than they were intellectual endeavors.
“Like Alberti, almost all Italian experts from the Quattrocento onwards believed that man was the measure of all things, and that by comparison to history painting, landscape played no more than a subordinate role”
So it’s as if there’s nothing there on a landscape, like it’s just this background. And like the visual landscape, Mirror’s Edge is also constructing this landscape of sound that fills up the back of our minds and draws us in.
So as we indulge in the city soundscape that forms this background, and we immerse ourselves in the subtle shifts of object sounds, we then hear the bang of the door.
And the door is a really good device, a good spacial device. Remember in episode four, I talked about spacial devices? Mirror’s Edge spends a lot of time building this landscape of sound, this mass of background scapes, and object sounds, and our sounds, and then it punctures that bubble. It’s a really powerful change of pace, we move from a loud, messy culmination into these very quiet interiors. And Mirror’s Edge is a game that has a lot to say about interior industrial spaces.
In Mirror’s Edge, every action makes a distinct sound. Nothing in the game sounds alike. So you can always tell by its sound what’s happening in the space. If you’re in a vent, or your climbing up a pipe, or if you’re inside or outside, in an elevator, running up stairs or down hallways. It’s almost as if you can tell exactly what’s going on, and where you are, just by listening to the game.
In the sense of our last session, we can top off these thoughts with a good question, because in art we want to think of good questions. So here’s a question: what are the things in Mirror’s Edge that tell us we exist? How are we able to understand that we have a body? Because this is a first person game, right? We don’t really see ourselves unless we look downwards. It’s very easy in these kinds of games to feel like a ghost with a weapon attached just floating around, but we don’t here.
And I would argue, that it’s centrally because of its sound. So if we think of painterly visuality, whether it’s representational, or abstract, or somewhere in between, as constructing this conceptual background, what is literally called the ground in a painting, the sort of base of the visual structure, the contruction of this space, and the visual objects and ideas that are created in this space, and come to the foreground, then we can think of sound in a similar way, where Mirror’s Edge builds this landscape of sound to establish its setting, but also has a structure of sounds embedded in these objects; the pipe the vent, the door, that tells us we are engaging with this space in a meaningful way.
That’s a big thought to chew on. The basic idea for me is that the sound in Mirror’s Edge makes our engagements with the space feel cathartic and meaningful. They also establish our existence! That we are bodies, engaging with material and physicality. And I’d say it’s like 80% of what makes the game so exciting.
