Video games have always been about pattern recognition among irrelevant detail, especially early arcade titles similar to System Shock's cyberspace sections.
This is false. In early arcade games there was little if anything on the screen that wasn't an active gameplay element. From Pong to Space Invaders to Asteroids to Donkey Kong, almost everything you could see was something you had to deal with. When technology allowed moving on from all-black backgrounds, with games like Street Fighter II, Golden Axe, etc., the purpose of the extraneous graphics was to look good, not to confuse the player. That's why good developers always did their best to make gameplay elements stand out from the background. The background would be a little less bright or vibrant or detailed, enemies would have black outlines and bold colors, etc. These principles carry on into the 3D era, with developers favoring relatively low-contrast environment textures and high-detail AI textures and models. This concern with failing to visually distinguish gameplay elements from environmental greebles is exactly why we got object highlighting in games like Deadly Shadows and Human Revolution as a slapped-on solution. This problem isn't even unique to video games. It's common across all visual arts-- the challenge of presenting an entire scene to the viewer but focusing their attention on what's important.
The only game I can think of off the top of my head where constantly assaulting the player's vision with irrelevant noise was a deliberate design decision was
Space Giraffe, and most people
hated it.
In light of all this, we now have Night Dive's vision of cyberspace, in which the frickin' walls are brighter, busier, and more detailed than the actual active elements in the levels. This is objectively bad game design, and doesn't even make sense from a lore perspective, since the core concept of cyberspace is that it's a visualization designed to be easy to navigate.
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