What can a 34-year-old Sonic level teach us about videogame light?

No videogame fantasy setting will ever disquiet me as much as an empty business park at night under blue and yellow floodlights. A business park, or the access road down the side of a corrugated steel warehouse, where the alcoves cast by the LEDs look like a procession of hooded figures beneath the fixed, unblinking blackness of the sky.

I can't actually be present in that scene, mind. I don't belong there. No being does, not even the people who come by day to fill the striped lines with cars or raise the shutters on the loading bays. Instead, I have to be travelling past very fast. Preferably, I will be looking out the window of a train that shows the place for only a few seconds. I will feel as though I've glimpsed another planet's scrolling surface in a mirror. Except this isn't right. I will never find the words for it. Nothing written above is adequate. Balls.

The nearest I've come to experiencing those emotions in a videogame is the Star Light Zone. It's the fifth Zone in the original Sonic The Hedgehog from 1991. It occupies a construction yard under a perfect starfield - a swelling landscape of green rivets, silver scaffolding and dim purple brick, with strips of skyscraper burning quietly in the distance.

It's an interlude of sorts, an exhalation between the watery crush of the Labyrinth and the sawtooth racket of Scrap Brain. There are spiked ball traps and coughing fire cannons but you are freer, here, to build momentum, almost as free as you are in the opening Green Hill Zone. There are fewer nasty surprises waiting at the end of ramps and loops, fewer knuckled interior segments to cramp your stride. The music is a cheery, nostalgic pop number that feels like it's gently bleeding off the adrenaline accumulated in the first four Zones, like it's getting you ready for bed.

The Star Light Zone isn't altogether a reprieve, however. There is an... expectancy to it, a chill. Partly it's that the landscape is portrayed as unfinished: in the foreground below the glittering skyscrapers there are brick shells with eyeless windows. But it's also eerie, perhaps, because it gets you thinking about the quality of the game's light.

Sonic's worlds are luminous throughout, by design and thanks to the graphics technology of the era. Such shadows that exist are crisp and ornamental, cleanly painted onto a geology of bevels that always appears illuminated, even in dingier regions such as Labyrinth, and even when the surfaces are notionally inside the architecture and terrain. By virtue of its setting, Star Light Zone makes a point of this pervasive radiance, gives it a context. The CRT glare takes on something of the stark steadiness of those loading bays and carparks I so enjoy being carried past at night.

I can imagine an exhausted Sonic Team developer listening to the Star Light Zone music on their Walkman while riding the train home in 1991. Or perhaps, conceiving of the level itself in those conditions. Sonic was the product of crunch, with members of its seven-strong development team working 19 hour days for six months. Crunch is the product, among other things, of artificial light, which allows for an extension of the working day, of consumption patterns and of systemic surveillance, limited only by the human being's feckless and unsporting need for sleep.

Electric light is among the parameters for what Jonathan Crary calls a world marked by "the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment", in his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. It is an element in the creation of "a non-stop work site" and "a zone of insensibility" - a culture that "is like a state of emergency, when a bank of floodlights are suddenly switched on in the middle of the night, seemingly as a response to some extreme circumstances, but which never get turned off and become domesticated into a permanent condition".

Videogames in general are party to this great sleeplessness, this searching insomnia. However urgently they may try to fill themselves with shadows, their worlds are unavoidably ablaze. They are among the screens that erode our diurnal rhythms and render our rest time productive. Screens without backlighting do exist - people have experimented with running video on electronic paper - but for the most part, a videogame's world is only truly dark when you turn it off.

The literal and philosophical insomnia outlined by Crary in his book isn't wholly unpleasant. Artificial lighting has given rise to a spectrum of thinkers, artists and wanderers who seek to cross certain thresholds after dark. "Nightwalkers experience urban life as a form of phantasmagoria, one that they are at the same time utterly immersed in and oddly detached from," writes Matthew Beaumont. Given some level of privilege - cities vary, and not everybody has a secure home and a bed to return to - wakefulness may become reverie and a kind of gracefully listing hyperfocus. "I'll spend an hour watching the rooftop of my house, which does not need to be watched," writes Debbie Urbanski of her own experiences of insomnia.

At the risk of Hot Takesmanship, I think people who make, play and write about video games could stand to talk in more complex ways about the operation of light - going beyond questions of quantifiable photorealism or catch-all 'atmospheric depth', and delving into both the phantasmagorical and the social dynamics that pervade even the hermetically sealed-off, cleanly goal-oriented worlds of singleplayer games. As Don Slater writes in an essay for Architectural Review, "lighting is structured through complex processes: policing, urban development and place-marketing policies, street lighting standards and engineering training, residents' fears and demands, tourism infrastructures and so on. Lighting materialises opposed, unequally valued spaces for entirely different sorts of people".

Videogames inherit such value judgements, mixed with 'pure' design considerations such as how to guide a player to an exit, or how to make a gunfight more difficult. Slater contrasts the "soft puddling effect" of preserved gaslights in heritage sites to the way "lighting enters social housing estates under the sign of securitisation and public order, with the intention not only of rendering every movement visible (ostensibly to disarm threats) but to declare that threatening movements define this kind of space". This is light without "character and value", reduced to its capacity to expose.

Star Light Zone's lighting isn't quite that characterless - this is an artistic representation, not an actual construction site - but it has something of the same lethally soft, lidless quality, which I now find hard to read apart from the material reality of overworked developers. However much it may try to simmer you down, I come out the other end of that Zone feeling Scrap Brained indeed, far too wired to sleep.