Why Do Games Still Have Levels?

a.d.venturer writes "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"

Comments

Re:Well on computers at least

[geekoid]

Yeah, right.
Moron.

What about stories?

[4D6963]

Why do games still have levels? Which brings us to this question, why do games still even have a story? You would have thought that by now games would have done like porn and done away with the non-fun part of them. I mean come on, we care as much about JC Denton's back story as we care about why the hot nurse with the big breasts is so devoted to her patients.

EDIT : Please don't reply to tell me how stories in games are important for immersion or whatever.
EDIT #2 : And stop asking me how to edit comments after posting them, it's right next the Parent link..