- Mirror’s Edge‘s “Runner Vision”, which subjectivizes, or models the subjective ability of Faith to see her way through the world. Though not activated/deactivated in game (you can toggle it from a menu, but it is not a Power or Ability that is mapped to a button like Eagle Vision in Assassin’s Creed), it acknowledges that what is seen is not an unfiltered reality. Paths are color-queued and the explanation is that this is a modeling of how the character reads the world. See Also Blades in the Dark, where the abstractions ostensibly model the skills of the characters in crime.
- Legibility of spaces – Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (or maybe Frederic Jameson’s cognitive mapping that builds off of that?). Runner vision color codes Lynch’s points and lines.
- Michael L. Black’s Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness which I have not read, but: “Expanding our definition of usability, Transparent Designs examines how popular and technical rhetoric shapes user expectations about what counts as usable and useful as much as or even more so than hardware and software interfaces.”
- Usability as a measure of the friction that happens when a specific bodymind articulates with an object that takes inputs and produces outputs
- Cameron Kunzelman on how Speculation works in games (see The World is Born from Zero). Causes and effects, and how your cause will be effected back at you on screen audiovisually (And also haptically with certain controllers)
- How heuristic understanding is frustrated/undermined/prevented by randomness.