I totally agree that referring to levels by name is at least as good as referring to them by position. And I agree that every level designer should ponder at least some time over the level title to make it descriptive, instead of using the very first pun that springs to mind.
But I disagree that descriptive titles have a big impact on remembering levels, i.e. that the two benefits described in Simon's first post are actually big. In my opinion, there is mostly a correlation rather than a causal relationship.
At least in my case there are three main reasons why I remember a level (and title):
- The level is very hard and a huge roadblock, e.g. "No added colors and lemmings", "Lemming's Ark" or "Oh no, not again".
- The level uses a very unique idea (or at least it was the first level I saw using this idea), e.g. "I am A.T.", "Cascade", "AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!" or even "Call the bomb squad".
- The level has a beautiful and unique terrain, e.g. "Hunt the Nessy", "Pea Soup", "Upside-down world" or the special graphics levels.
In all these cases I can easily remember the level and title, regardless how bad the title is.
On the other hand there are aptly titled levels like "Let's block and blow", "A ladder would be handy", "Turn around young lemmings!", "Bomboozal", "Walk the web rope", "The Far Side" or "All or Nothing", where I don't remember the level layout. These examples came from looking through the L1 level list on
http://tle.vaarties.nl/ and writing down the ones where I only remembered them after seeing them in the list.
All these levels have in common, that their solution is rather standard and nothing special.
The arguments so far should explain why I don't see a strong causal relationship. But there is a correlation:
- If a level has a very unique terrain, then it is an easy and natural thing to give it a title referring to this.
- If a level has a very unique idea, then referring to this (at least in an oblique way) is again somewhat natural, because the level designer did have a specific theme in mind and therefore is likely to refer to it when choosing the title.
- If a level just turns out to be very hard due to a well-hidden solution, then giving it a good title is actually very hard, as my examples above show.
But the levels from the first two categories already suffice to establish the correlation between memorable levels and ones with good titles.