Emotion and representation in level design

Summarized from Errant Signal, “DUSK and the Design of 90’s FPS Games”2019.

Mid-90s FPS games split into two design philosophies. This experimental period existed because video games were a new medium. Who was to say if they had to be representational?

Doom and Quake conveyed emotion with their level design:

E1M1 in Quake is not meant to represent a literal functional military base, but instead it’s a playground for gameplay that confers the lonely, dreary mood, as well as the boxy mechanical industrial geometry being severed with a river and a cave system, suggesting it’s intruding where it shouldn’t be.

They were all emotion and no logic.

Build Engine games like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood took the opposite approach despite the technical limitations at the time:

Where Quake and Doom wanted gameplay first, tone second, and narrative not really at all, the Build games were largely about representational levels that felt like real places first and modified to support gameplay second.

These games wanted to present “lived-in” realistic locations. It was all logic and no emotion.

By 1998 with Half-Life and Sin, representational spaces dominated. The abstract approach faded, though Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena’s mapping communities kept spatial experimentation alive briefly. That sense of adventure in level design, conferring emotion through architecture, had largely vanished from single-player shooters.