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

Accomplishment

[jacobcaz]

Games have "levels" so gamers can feel a sense of accomplishment at moving up a rung? Kinda' like - you know - life? Work hard, get promoted = meatspace leveling. Same with XP in MMORGs?

What I can't figure out is why everyone in my office gets all weird when I start killing co-workers during my XP grind? Sheesh...

See Books, Albums, etc.

[EMeta]

For the same reason books still have chapters and music albums still have tracks. Humans like pauses between though, time to digest and segregate before doing something different.

Ever read a book without chapters? It's a pain. Likewise, can you imagine playing a Mario game where you were just running form the beginning to the end? that would be nuts. Sure, for some applications, continuous can be really interesting. But that's just not what is most natural to people, whether it's like the real world or not.

Some of the best games also have levels...

[7Prime]

No matter what you do, you have to have some kind of organizational system to a game. Be it "levels" or "zones" or "areas". All of the "non-level" games you mentioned simply use litterary and organizational devices that superficially hide the level structure. Metroid, for instance, has enclosed locals, which usually are accessed via elevators or (herectical) drop points. Shadow of the Colossus has different Colossi which are defeated in order. These are levels, they provide the same super-structure, they are just better hidden. But some games thrive off of much more obvious hierarchical organization. The Mario series, for instance, has always done wonderfully with levels, and (in the 3D era), missions within these levels.

You are basically complaining about superficial differences in game progression. Traditional, levels-based gameplay can be made to be completed in a non-linear fashion, with minimal loading time, and freedom of movement (see Super Mario Galaxy for a recent, and rediculously good example). Where-as less defined organization (like some of the games you mentioned) can be very strictly linear, and have terrible load times. This is more a result of the programming and overall design, not whether a game has levels or not.

There are great usages of level-based design, and terrible ones. It's about as helpful as saying, "why, after all these years, are there still FPSs?" as if one genre of game is inherently inferior.

Re:WTF

[croddy]

Portal has levels because the Enrichment Center's testing environment has levels. If anything, Portal is a satire of this phenomenon, presenting the absurdity of slicing up an adventure into neat chunks by putting the player in the position of a real person progressing through such a system.

Re:Well on computers at least

[porpnorber]

...So this all summarises as "we didn't write the engine, so what can we do"?

Antecedent - Behavior - Consequence

[75th Trombone]

People keep replying that levels are for some technological reason, or else that a story or some other external element requires them. But neither of those are correct. It's HUMANS that require them.

We need payoff. We need to feel like we've accomplished something bigger than defeating one enemy, but smaller than finishing the game. We need to expunge all the cruft from one section of the game from our minds to make way for new information.

LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM FOLLOWS:

On one level, we're getting reinforced all the time when we play games. We see an enemy (antecedent), we shoot the enemy (behavior), the enemy dies and the path is cleared (consequence). A couple of levels up, we have the whole game as one contingency, where playing the game is the behavior and having the game finished is the consequence. (I was having a hard time coming up with the exact antecedent on that one.)

But other than with very short games, we need something in between those two. Eventually most people will get satiated on the enemy-shooting contingency; without a higher contingency than that, but a lower contingency than the far-away end of the game, there's no strong enough, near enough reinforcement to be worth continuing to play. (At least for a while.)

END LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM

Game designers know all of this, so they space out the payoff so that there's always something near enough (end of a level) to be worth fighting toward. Eventually, most people will get satiated even with intermittent big payoff, but it takes a lot longer than if the game was just one big level. And in the end, the main goal of game designers is to keep you playing as long as possible.