Why worry about what an ‘average’ person would notice? Room descriptions are a great chance to enhance atmosphere or characterization by describing what your PC notices.
A while ago someone posited three different descriptions for a table (my google-fu is failing to locate it so here is a paraphrase):
-
X TABLE
You reflect on the day you bought this table with your roommates. Laura fell in love with it right away when she saw it in the thrift shop; Jason didn’t really care, but shrugged because it was the cheapest one and you needed something to eat on.
-
X TABLE
Genuine Earth manufacture, by the looks of it!
-
X TABLE
You see a scratched and stained wooden kitchen table.
Only one of the three is about the table’s physical appearance, you’ll note. (And for purposes of rhetoric, it’s also the most boring.)
same goes for room descriptions, I think. They can be very evocative if you choose the right words. Some games are about pretty much nothing BUT location. And that’s just fine with yours truly (I’m a sucker for good atmosphere in a game; yes, I adored “Myst”).
I prefer to list exits with their compass direction because, let’s be honest, it makes life for the player a lot simpler. You can insist on left, right, back and forward, but then you’ll have to limit movement carefully or do a lot more coding because the perspectives will change every time the PC moves. “Hunter, in Darkness” has a nice sequence featuring left/right/ahead/up/down options only, but the game is designed so you can’t get lost.
Of course, with a strictly hypertext/choice game you don’t have to worry, because the player can do nothing except click the options you present, and most games don’t give you the chance to turn around. In any case, the options for which way to go are all in the hyperlinks, so a player won’t get stuck unless you screwed up and sent him into a loop, or purposely designed a maze of twisty little passages for him…
But even sticking with the compass you can list things out of order, use verbs creatively, vary the sentence lengths and so on to keep things interesting.
Google VR is definitely nice, if you have a real-life location in mind. In some cases you can use the map/street view to get a panoramic look at any point near a street; handy if you wish to pay a visit to a plaza in Rome, but haven’t got the airfare.