A pattern language for expressive environments (an opinionated summary from an interface design perspective)

What are the signifiers that make a space recognizable? How can you “communicate” a living room, a church, a casino with the least amount of details?

• Decision points/making a choice, especially explicit, discrete decision trees to explore with obvious ways to backtrack, reified in "obstacles and passages."
• Readable affordances for the environment -- which doors can you open? Which obstacles can you interact with? Which roads can you actually take? Affordances that are clear from a distance in moments of urgency/flow can help ease navigation and keep user/player in flow.
• Landmark/global signposting, wherein you orient the player globally in space with an always-visible large landmark that almost becomes a part of the geography, like a mountain or a tower or a light source.
  • A brightly illuminated area or light source is a particularly effective global landmark, because humans avoid darkness and chase the light.
• Grand vistas and viewpoints can serve as effective points of tension release/milestones, as well as a way for the user to understand global geography of a space and a way to encourage exploration.
• In-narrative boundaries, limits, and walls can be natural ways for the interface/game to signal invalid action spaces or off-limits areas. These usually take the form of topographic formations like shorelines in islands, unscalable walls in valleys, etc.
  • Alternatively, the infinity/unboundedness of procedurally generated worlds can be emphasized in-narrative for greater effect.
• Feel of embodied movement -- "Consider the game feel of your control system and how your environment accommodates for it. A first person perspective can be grounded with heavy footsteps and head bobbing, or disembodied and ghostlike."
  • Walking, gliding, falling, floating upwards...
• Cozy, "home" environments/sites vs. the outdoors