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A History of Touch Games Technology
Next Generation has up a lengthy article about the history of touch interaction in games. Above and beyond the obvious, like the DS or the touch panel table demonstrated last year, they also explore concepts like physical interaction in adventure games like Myst. "The popular growth of videogames has been more or less tied to a minimization of distance, and an increase in tangibility; making the player feel like he can touch the world, and that doing so will matter. It makes sense, right? Make people feel actively involved, and they will actively involve themselves. As developers have piled on the abstractions - more buttons, more unspoken conventions, a more confusing perspective - and reveled in the already-existing distance, videogames have passively sunk into their niche, to appeal only to those familiar enough to overlook and accept the abstractions."
Isn't that in part because much of the scenery in recent 3D games is throwaway material? Take Bioshock: so much effort went into making Rapture breathtakingly beautiful, but you never visit a location more than once. Instead you pass through, never to return. No wonder then that the place doesn't inspire: you never get the chance to bond with it, to make it your own.
Now look at its spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2: it had an inventive level structure that slowly opened up as the game progressed. It promoted returning to earlier locations and made it easy by opening up ever more shortcuts. As a result, the Von Braun is a far more real place to me than Rapture - I have explored every nook and cranny, and I know how it all hangs together. I can navigate it with confidence. Places have meaning to me: "here I can go to heal" or "here I can go to do research".
To be honest, the linearity was something that disappointed me greatly about Bioshock - and I suspect, much for the same reason that you have such good memories of Dungeon Master.