maybe level design ultimately depends on a sense of difference which gamedevs never really had to explicitly recognize or theorize given the chaotic stitched together nature of their own tools. but which is more visible now in absence after like a 20+ year campaign of seamlessness - in perspective, control, physics system, mechanical meaning, visuals (continuity of background clutter), sound (various generative music systems), theme and emotional meaning etc... continuity of game developer intent itself in a system which treats them as parts
what do i mean by difference, i dunno, i guess the basic example is just stuff like "the music changes on level 2" and extrapolating from there - the feeling that the game itself is a kind of angled object and that over the course of rolling it in your hands you are discovering new sides of the object, conceptual or aesthetic or whatever else - learning what this object is and what it consists of.. imagining a lot of games that have "impeccable design" as shapes can sometimes reveal them to be flat planes (the one thing extrapolated forever) or uniform spheres (perpetual mild discoveries in a way that ultimately feel kind of undifferentiated). playing them i find myself wishing for torn surfaces or unexpected breaks in texture. moments where consciousness and material have crashed into each other and left a dent, a hole, a crash site to examine, at a point where both consciousness and material sort of feel like controlled substances banished from the magic realm of the computer
