I recently read Catcher in the Rye, and I loved it. Nothing could have been more piercing to me at a time of adolescent uncertainty. I really connected with Holden Caulfield in a way that validates the experience of reading more than I could ever express, and at the same time I would understand if you read Salinger's vaunted work and totally disagreed.

I once wrote a story about a boy and a girl who rode an elevator up to heaven. It was pretty lame, but hey, I liked it, and it meant a lot to me. I got the idea from a game called Mirror's Edge, a first-person style game about free-running and parkour. It's a game whose beauty lies in its environment and the player's capacity to interact with it. In it, you play a free-runner named Faith, a fairly a petite asian woman who practices parkour as she navigates the rooftops of an urban paradise. It's about sublimity through immersion.

Faith's sister, Kate, is framed for a crime she didn't commit. The government in this city is corrupt, and it needed a patsy on which to pin its political bile. Faith has a chance to save her, but only if she gathers the information she needs and stays away from the police. It's the narrative impetus for all the running around.

Nothing about Mirror's Edge is gratuitous, and that alone inserts a mile-wide chasm between it and most video games today. Her city is painted in sugary swatches, bright colors that emphasize simplicity you're allowed to reach out and touch. One of the best things about Mirror's Edge is its first-person viewpoint. Because it's a game centered around fluid platforming, looking through the eyes of Faith invites an experientially unprecedented level of intimacy with the environment, a sentiment which serves no functional purpose. In fact, it kind of makes things harder.

If you've seen a game from the first-person viewpoint, chances are you were looking down the barrel of a gun. First-person is largely reserved for shooters, and those have rarely include platforming (with good reason, since your options are usually move and jump awkwardly). Cliff Bleszinksi, game director at Epic Games, once said that shooting is the most commercially viable and dependable way to let a player interact with a game. Guns, he said, are the player's conduit to the environment - a destructive, albeit effective way to reach out and "touch" the world - but no where along the line did I feel that was true in Mirror's Edge.

In Mirror's Edge you're allowed to run up to the environment and grab it -- use it and feel it. It's almost cheating the way it gives you a sense of immersion just by letting you be close to what you see. So when the game does let you pick up a gun (one of two combat options; you're allowed to either shoot enemies or run up and use hand-to-hand combat), it's actually disengaging. The experience of "touching" something by shooting it feels dirty by comparison.

There is something inherently beautiful about interacting with the environment the way you do in Mirror's Edge. In other games, looking at one's feet reveals a lack of anything. In Mirror's Edge when we look down, we see Faith herself. She sports a pair of red and black running shoes and some khaki pants. When Faith runs, she breathes. She huffs and puffs. When she picks up speed, you can hear the wind slice past her ears, her footsteps pound as her vision blurs slightly. Immersion has never been so sublime.