Gamasutra has an interview up with Swedish developer DICE about their new parkour-based project, Mirror’s Edge.

The interview talks a bit about the dystopian world where freerunners act as messengers to avoid the wiretaps of the oppressive government.

Owen O’Brian: One of the core questions that the game asks you is, how much of your personal freedom are you willing to give up for a comfortable life? And the other sort of theme for the game is, you can’t force other people to live by your rules and your society, even if your society is better — even if you have got better health care…

Gamasutra: But you live in Scandinavia, so you’ve got better health care.

OO: We have, yeah. We have. I’m quite happy with it. (laughs)

As a Gamasutra feature, the interview focuses on game design decisions. One interesting thing is the way the game highlights your potential paths in red. Initially the game treated this literally, with markers left by other runners. As time went on, it became more of a “your character sees the world differently” approach.

The article also talks about the game’s first-person perspective, a rarity for a game that’s all about motion. Since the player in a game gets no natural sense of their avatar’s place in space, they usually rely on a camera view set somewhere behind the character. It’s a strange choice, but DICE seems confident they can pull it off.

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