Level design, modeling, and texture design compose the disciplines of 3D environment creation, which I invite you to explore through the links below:
Telling A Better Story

Games are, in my opinion, a very effective - if not the most effective - means of telling stories. Some excellent examples of such games would be the Final Fantasy series, Valve's Half Life series, and Glyphx's Advent Rising game (to name but a few). I would elaborate more right here, but I've already done so in my paper "Telling A Better Story," which you can grab and read HERE (pdf, 625KB). Please right-click and select save as - attempting to open it in your browser might crash Adobe Reader (or it might not - wouldn't hurt to try...)