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?"

well

[moogied]

If it works, don't fix it.

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...

Re:Why do games have levels?

[webmaster404]

Exactly, for some games like adventures and RPGs levels take away from the game, for platformers and some shooters it is pointless not to use a level or mission like system.

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.

Why do movies still have cuts?

[Have Blue]

Why isn't everything filmed in one continuous take, like Children of Men or that X-Files episode? There are even some movies that let time pass during cuts. 24 obviously perfected pacing and editing, why isn't everyone doing that?

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:Simple

[complete loony]

Because scheduling disk IO in a way that doesn't effect performance is hard. And IIRC because someone patented the idea of playing a mini game while the main game is loading.

Re:See Books, Albums, etc.

[morari]

I think albums would do better without such harshly separated tracks. I much prefer long, seamlessly integrated concepts as opposed to a collection of tunes vying to become the one or two radio singles.

Ultima Ascension!

[myowntrueself]

Ok aside from its really really crap game play in other respects, one of the things that really impressed me about 'Ultima IX: Ascension' was the way that the world was totally seamless.

You walked around the world with no load screens at all, through tunnels under the sea to the island on the other side and swim back again. Walk into buildings, cave systems, castles all in one huge seamless world.

The graphics were incredible. Did I mention no load screens?

1999 or so. And there was not much hardware available at the time to play it with all the graphics turned right up to 11.

Pity about the crap game play tho, it became so boring after a while that the only way I could bring myself to finish it was to use hacks.

So no, lack of load screens does not a great game make.

Re:Well on computers at least

[n dot l]

Have you considered using relocatable handles to your in-memory assets rather than a slot system? Handles allow you to compact memory to eliminate fragmentation and it sounds like just the sort of thing you could use.

That's not usually an option. Most games embed some sort of middleware like physics or scripting engines which account for a huge amount of fragmentation. I've heard stories about projects where the fragmentation caused by the script runtime alone was orders of magnitude greater than that caused by the rest of the engine (and it's damn near impossible to train designers to write script that doesn't create thousands of temporary objects). Usually fragmentation in those components is dealt with by giving them a private heap that's written to deal with their specific allocation patterns, which is as simple as replacing their calls to malloc/free (or new/delete). Rewriting these components to use relocatable memory is another matter altogether, and is hardly ever feasible.

Besides that you have the overhead of constantly locking/unlocking the handle to get at the actual pointer. And the odd stutter whenever you have to compact memory (which is completely unacceptable in certain game types - platformers for example are extremely frustrating if they stutter in the middle of some precisely timed maneuver).

And on top of that you often have to deal with multi-threaded systems where the locking/unlocking mechanism gets really interesting, and expensive - and forces you to attach some extra "locked" bits to each allocation. On top of this, if the compactor has to deal with locked memory blocks, then you either have to control what can be locked and when at a very fine level, or you essentially re-introduce the fragmentation problem. Fixed addresses mean you only have to ensure that other threads don't free some data that's still in use which is much easier to deal with.

Hard to make continuous worlds

[graveyhead]

Take a look at this neat paper The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege [drizzle.com].

It explains a great detail of the issues surrounding a system like this. The more interesting issues are as others have mentioned are memory and disk i/o management, but also there's another lovely curiosity in there... floating point numbers begin to quantize more and more the further you get away from the origin. It means it's impossible to have a global coordinate system.

Enjoy.

How does this warrant a front page

[dk1001]

This AskSlashdot sure doesn't warranty the front page, or even BEING ASKED. Seriously, I wish I was older so I could say slashdot's gone downhill. The question asker has obviously not thought out his question, or have any point on it. His criteria aren't accurate or consistant - he asks why games still have levels, and states seamless play as being the apparent end all (when its pretty damn clear that its not). The Metroid Prime series (which I'm a big fan of) ALL HAVE LEVELS - even the ones on a continuous world like Prime and Echoes have levels. you just walk between them. Nor is it seamless - there are frequent cutscenes where I am outside of my control - but does it bug me that I lose control of myself, in order to have a cool looking sequence where Samus has a western style stand-off with Dark Samus in a sci-fi reactor room? No, that sequence looked rad. Could they have had that sequence if it didn't break the seam and have a cutscene? No. Half life similarly, while seamless, has pretty obvious levels, just once again, you walk between them - in HL2 there is the antlion cave level, leading to the outdoor antlion guard showdown, leading to the fetching the car stage, driving around getting ambushed, Fight the Helicopter in the Crate Yard (or whatever you want to call it). Continous, yes, levels, yes. So why aren't some games seamless, and why do games still have levels? Because seamless and level-less aren't the end all of game design - they are an option, that like all other things you can put in a game, are awesome where appropriate, and are just suckful when they get put where they don't belong. Zonk, your standards seem to be pretty low, how about the next front page question be "Why Doesn't Every Author Write Books Like Phillip Pullman?"

Re:Well on computers at least

[porpnorber]

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

Re:Why do movies still have cuts?

[skeeto]

Hitchcock's Rope [imdb.com] appears to be one single long continuous shot. There actually are a couple cuts, which you can spot if you look for them. They are carefully hidden by clever camera movements. But, to the audience, it appears as a single shot with one scene.

In fact, this movie is based on a play that isn't broken into scenes either. (Maybe it is a metaphor for the name "Rope"?)

Anyway, one continuous scene like that can be exhausting to watch. I am glad that this isn't common.

Re:Because they are useful

[sootman]

Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium.

It is funny (if I were snootier I might say 'ironic') but on a really, really good book I don't even notice the new chapters starting. There have been several books I've read that really hit the ground running and the first time I'd notice a new chapter was around 7 or 8.

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.

Re:HL2 Has Levels?

[p0tat03]

This is something we're just starting to scratch on. Why have we always been stuck with boring loading screens, why can't the game load things on the fly? The answer is very simple: multitasking SUCKS on a single CPU. Oh yes, we run a lot of apps simultaneously every day, but have you ever tried loading a level in the background while trying to render a complex scene at 60fps, on a single CPU? You may have noticed that, in the old days (which really is just a couple of years ago) loading screens weren't just static by design - the game would actually STOP responding to the OS while it was too busy loading crap. Notice now, though, with games like Gears of War, where levels are loaded during cutscenes (part of the reason why they're not skippable), or Ghost Recon, where levels are loaded during your mission briefing. Because of the advent of consumer multi-core machines, we are finally able to do something resembling dynamic loading. This is something developers are keenly aware of, and are doing a lot to fix.