You could even consider each of the dream levels in the final sequence as representing prominent genres of level design in games.

The first level of immersion was very like a GTA sandbox where you can hijack vehicles, find warehouses to hide in, and are fighting off attackers from multiple vantage points. Not to mention you have the option of using either a rifle or heavy duty grenade launcher to deal with those pesky shooters.

The second level in the hotel is a more typical closed world environment where both stealth and firefights are enabled/made more challenging by corridors, passageways, and bystanders (say Rainbow Six Vegas or the Splinter Cell games). In fact I would love to see more elevator shaft traversing in games like that.

And the last level, well that was straight out of Modern Warfare 2, complete with snow, mountaintop encampments, foreign paramilitary on snowmobiles, high explosives, and automatic weapons fire.

The whole movie could be seen as almost an homage to classic level design, where even the Paris scene was like a twisted ground level view of what it is like to play SimCity. Sometimes you create new and exciting things and sometimes you recreate the familiar because it is comforting.

And people’s bodies vanishing after you kill them.

There is the one I mentioned on twitter, that Cobb (Decaprio’s character) essentially represents the player of a linear game who can’t help but to mess it up with his own emergence. Someone else creates a level for him, and tells him what he is meant to do in it, but he always manages to bring his own experiences into it to play it his own way–even when he does not want to.

A more technical one that I do not have the exact words for, but noticed from my 18 months of a failed Multimedia degree is when architect girl uses the two mirrors to create the corridor of pillars. Essentially what she has done is made her own complex object out of a set of simple shapes and copy/pasted it. This reminds me of level design techniques designers use to save time.

I’m sure there are still plenty more. Just as The Matrix was the perfect film analogy for games for the past decade, Inception will be all the analogies for the next decade.

On a side note, am I the only one who noted many parallels between Inception and Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer? Essentially, Inception was a cyberpunk story, afterall.