Scenario 1: I sprint at top-speed toward the edge of a roof, a 10-foot gap, and a 15-foot drop to the roof on the next skyscraper below. Leaping into the air, I lift my legs just high enough to clear the safety rail by an inch. A few crisp seconds of flight; the impact on the roof below; a perfectly executed roll to avoid taking damage, and immediately I'm back at top-speed. I wall-run across a billboard, leap off it to grab the edge of a catwalk, and lift myself up in a smooth and effortless motion.
Scenario 2: I jog along a sidewalk and approach a safety rail on the side of the curb. I grip it with my right hand, and use my momentum and a little bit of a jump to vault over it and land cleanly on the other side. I jog across the street, approach a low wall, leap and plant one foot against it to pop myself up and grab the top, and slowly and with some effort manage to lift myself over. I could jump down to the other side and roll, but maybe I'm not quite ready yet -- better lower into a cat hang first for a safer drop.
Which of those scenarios sounds more exciting? Would you change your answer if I told you the first was in a video game and the second real life?
When Mirror's Edge came out last November, I had just begun to get more serious about learning parkour. It's something I had wanted to do for a long time, but didn't consider seriously until last year. Now I've been training for about 10 months, and it has made me look at parkour in gaming in a whole new way.
To be sure, there has been a lot of parkour in video games in recent years, from Mirror's Edge to Infamous, Prototype to Assassin's Creed -- hell, even Batman often looks like a traceur while exploring Arkham Asylum. But as I progress further in my abilities in real life, I'm noticing more and more an unexpected effect: Seeing parkour in a video game only makes me want to immediately stop playing, and go outside and start doing. And this, to me, is a completely insane and foreign mentality.
Believe me when I tell you I have never been a physically active person. This is, as the cliché often goes, probably why I got so into video games as a kid in the first place -- the simple escapism they offer is of paramount appeal, as you're allowed to vicariously experience things you could never do in real life.
But the more my efforts in conditioning and training have progressed, the more I've begun to reconsider what "could never do in real life" means to me. Why pretend to do speed vaults, pop-vaults, and underbars in a video game when I could be outside practicing to do them myself? What purpose does it serve me to improve my time trial runs in Mirror's Edge if it doesn't improve my rail precisions at my local park? For what seems like the first time in my life, I've discovered that a vicarious thrill in a video game just isn't...thrilling enough.
I'm reminded of all the times my guitar-playing friends (and I have more than a couple) nagged me over the years about playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band instead of actually learning to play guitar. They just didn't get it, I thought -- I play Guitar Hero and Rock Band because I don't know how to play guitar. But now I can at least see it their way, and understand how my reasons (legitimate to me) simply don't hold water for them.
No, I'm not saying I'm done with gaming -- far from it. There are plenty of other great reasons to play video games besides vicarious thrills, and I'm not planning on learning guitar anytime soon, so even that aspect hasn't lost all its appeal. But I do know that the more parkour training I do, the more Mirror's Edge simply doesn't do it for me -- and maybe all that means is I've found a better balance of hobbies in my life.
So this weekend, I know what I'm going to do: practice rail precisions at my local park, and then finally get around to finishing the last portions of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Damn that's a great game.
And now for the inevitable audience participation portion: Has anyone out there lost interest in certain games after deciding to learn what they depict? Any skateboarders stopped playing Skate? Any paintballers finding themselves playing fewer first-person shooters? Bowlers playing less Wii Sports bowling? Uh...fishermen who aren't playing as many fishing games? Anything goes! If you got a relevant story, share it in the comments.
Bonus: Check out this nifty video by a local South Florida traceur (who was nice enough to train with me and show me a few things when I first started) comparing Altair's moves to his own in real life. Pretty accurate, huh?
