Two-term PCPP editor David Wildgoose and I once had an argument in the office when we should have been finishing the magazine. David insisted that the original Quake had a compelling set of levels that communicated to the player a sense of being lost inside a strange, nightmarish, unknowable world, and I insisted that he was an idiot for thinking so.

What I didn't tell him later because we were distracted by a problem with how half the pages in half the issue of the mag that had just come up were glued in upside-down, was that I thought about his position and actually agreed with it.

Quake doesn't attempt to recreate a Martian research base or a piece of New York or a famous battle from World War II. Instead it gives you a bunch of levels that make no functional sense. Why does the eponymous Wizard have no bedroom in his Manse but he does have a bunch of interconnecting walkways suspended over lava? Who created the secret passageways that can only be opened by shooting them and lead to a 100 Health and an earlier part of the level? And which architectural genius designed the elevator that almost kills anyone who takes a ride in it, because half the ride is under water?

These and many other nonsensical bits of level design define the worlds of Quake. Then along came Quake 2, which was supposed to be set on the Strogg homeworld and had to actually make sense. And you know what? The levels were more boring. Endless corridors, big empty spaces, and crates absolutely goddamn everywhere.

Funny thing is, while original Quake's level seem positively avante-garde and daringly anti-representational, when the game first came out I was miffed that the levels weren't as interactive and abstract as the ones in Doom.

Doom, for me, is the ultimate in abstract gaming. The ultimate expression of Spielspiel uber Alles. This is a game, after all, where third-party level designers ie me can quite easily design a level that's nothing more than a giant arena with a towering biomechanical pillar in the middle, except when you run through the door a maze springs up from the floor and monsters spawn in from points elsewhere. The way the architecture can be moved and manipulated makes Doom so much more than just running through corridors shooting Imps and Cacodemons.

But the baffling thing since has been the way developers seem trapped in this idea of representational level design. "Oh, sorry this level is a bit boring but you have to realise that a sewer is basically just a whole bunch of conduits laid out in a logical grid pattern."

Where this gets super-insane is in Doom 3. Here's an engine that demonstrates at every turn that the architecture can be heavily animated and manipulated, but is this used to enhance the gameplay? No, it's used to fill the bland corridors with baffling machines that shunt endlessly back and forward but don't impact on the player in any way.

There are puzzles, but instead of "figure out the switches to lower the inexplicable floating blocks to raise the lava floor and crush the Imps to conserve ammo", it's "stack barrels using this computerised forklift".

In other words, because the puzzles have to be logically consistent with the contrived representational world of the game, they get boring. Man, when I play a game that involves shooting demons from another dimension, I want to flip switches that lower a series of walls to both expose me to attacks from every direction and reveal that I'm standing on a giant swastika!.

Here's another thing about representational game design: no one ever said Marble Madness had shit graphics. No one ever complained about the lack of iron sights in Tetris. The more you try to make a game look exactly like the real world, the more you can pick its various shortcomings apart.

"Half Life 2? Man, the newspapers on the floor of the train station are just painted on!" And don't even get me started about how crap vehicles look in almost any other first person shooter.

I'm not saying there isn't a place for games that aim to model some aspect of the real world. But I do think that games like Prey and FEAR aren't those games. FEAR's nightmarish twisting of the real world could have been SO awesome, but the focus on enemy AI meant every level had to be made up of chunks that could be rotated and flipped to the AI could find its way around.

Every time I run through an intricately detailed burned-out playground (the new apocalyptic cliche) I yearn for the days of random giant elevators that suddenly sink down to reveal a posse of pinkies running straight at you... while the chainsaw sits on a plinth half a level away, waiting for the blue key.