The Model: How LUNA Thinks About Games

Three Scenes, One Concept

Children in a courtyard shout “Last one to the tree loses!” and start running. Four adults unpack Catan in the evening. A player logs into an online role-playing game that has accompanied her for years. Three completely different situations – and yet everyone involved recognises immediately: play is happening here.

LUNA captures what they share in the fundamental concept of the Ludic Process: the happening that at least one agent frames as play. The framing is explicit – “Let’s play”, the arranged match – or follows a convention by which such a happening is play: nobody has to declare tag in the schoolyard, the card game at the pub or the league match to be play. No process, no play – no matter how complete the material sits on the shelf.

The framing is an act, not a state that has to be kept up. It refers to this one happening and has a reach: this match, this evening, this tournament. That is where the beginning and end of the process come from. The group breaks for dinner, and the game of Catan goes on; the online campaign stretches over years and many sessions. Whoever later watches a Let’s Play, by contrast, sees the recording of a process, not one.

Like the word “game”, the concept has two sides: “the Ludic Process” is the principle, “a Ludic Process” this one match. The principle fits free play with a ball just as well as the years-long online game. The single match is what designers observe when they want to know whether their game holds up.

Four Quantities: the Reference Axis

Everything LUNA talks about is ordered by four quantities. Together they are called the reference axis: Agent – Process – Corpus – Form.

• The Ludic Agent is whoever takes part in the process and decides independently within it: the players, the referee, the spectator, the dog playing fetch, the chess computer.
• The Ludic Process is the framed happening itself.
• The Ludic Corpus is the body of specifications that hold for a process, together with the material in which they exist: the Carcassonne box with its rulebook, the code, graphics and sound of a game app, the agreed rules of a field game.
• The Ludic Form is the medial, material and interactional condition under which a game is realised: at the table with cardboard and wood, at the screen with a gamepad, on the pitch with the whole body, in the head.

Two points deserve a second look. The corpus is optional. Children playing with a ball settle what is to hold while they play – that is free play. Specifications become a corpus when they carry beyond the match: when a second match could be started from them. What separates the corpus from the process is status, not time. Most specifications are made in advance, but not all: the house rule a group adopts mid-game, the improvising game master, the goal someone sets themselves in a sandbox are specifications too. A specification determines what is to hold; an event is what happens.

The axis can be read in two directions.

From the outside in, each quantity determines what is possible at the next. The form spans the space of possibilities for corpora: a board game can only do what the players can calculate and keep track of by hand; a digital game moves thousands of units in real time. The corpus spans the space of possibilities for processes: which matches Carcassonne allows is set by its tiles and rules. And the process determines, at every moment, the action space of each agent – what it can do next.

From the inside out, the agents make and change. They make the happening into a process. And they change the corpus as far as their authority reaches – LUNA calls it Ludic Sovereignty: with the house rule at the kitchen table, with the agreement in a field game, in Pandemic Legacy, where the rules allow players to tear up cards and draw cities onto the map. The corpus is always changed by agents, never by the happening itself.

Agent and process presuppose each other: a person is a Ludic Agent by taking part in a process; a happening is a process because an agent makes it one. The form depends on no other quantity – it exists before any game.

Design, Enable, Hope

From the axis follows what design can achieve, in three steps of decreasing control:

What is designed is the specification. What is enabled is the process. What is hoped for is the experience.

LUNA therefore asks of every concept what its design access is. Designable is what one specifies – a rule, the colour of a die. Targetable is what one creates the conditions for and then checks whether it occurs – the arc of tension in a match. Addressable is what one can speak to but not control.

The agents are addressable. What can be regulated is their action space: what they can and may do in the game. What they want, what they feel and how they decide is determined by no game. This is the design asymmetry. The same Werewolf round that becomes a feast of bluffing among close friends falls into awkward silence with a group of strangers – the rules are identical, the agents are not. The same game of Uno runs differently with eight-year-olds than with their grandparents. Good design takes this boundary seriously: it states for whom it designs and what it may not presuppose, and it builds offers instead of guarantees. A game cannot force an experience – it can make it likely.

Three Questions for Every Element: the RAF Triad

What the corpus specifies attaches to something: to the things of a game – pieces, cards, spaces, resources –, to what happens – moving, capturing, trading –, and to the structures that order both: when, where, with whom, from where. LUNA asks three questions of each of them:

Question	Term	Examples
How is it regulated?	Ludic Regulation	what is permitted, constrained, conditioned: the knight moves in an L, the hand limit is seven, whoever laughs is out.
How does it appear?	Ludic Appearance	how it looks, sounds, feels: the die is red, the gong sounds, the board feels rough.
What does it count as?	Ludic Fiction	what is to be imagined of it: the wooden cube counts as gold, the piece as a knight, the phase as night.

The three form the RAF triad, after Regulation, Appearance and Fiction. The queen in chess moves any distance straight and diagonally, she is a tall piece with a crown, and she counts as a queen. The little wooden figure in Carcassonne marks who owns an area and returns after scoring; it is a wooden silhouette that sits well in the hand; and it counts as a knight in a city, a highwayman on a road, a monk in a monastery.

Each of the three can be specified on its own. Whoever gives the queen a different shape has not touched her movement rules; whoever calls the wooden figure a “knight” has not changed its scoring. Where the specifications diverge, coherence costs arise – and that is where the room for design lies. LUNA distinguishes how two specifications on the same element relate to each other:

• congruent – one confirms what the other leads us to expect: the spikes in Super Mario look dangerous and are.
• contrastive – one breaks the expectation raised by the other: the smiling flower in Undertale counts as a villain; the jail in Monopoly is the safest place late in the game.
• open – one leaves open what the other leads us to expect: the knight piece does not show how it moves.

None of these modes is better; each has its price. The most common beginner’s mistake is not a chosen mode but an accidental one.

For work on a game this means: whoever finds something “wrong” first asks where the problem lies. Why does nobody play the mage? Perhaps his values are weak – a matter of regulation. Perhaps he looks like a minor character – appearance. Perhaps “mage” raises expectations the game does not meet – fiction. Or it is not the game at all: everyone at the table wants to fight. Then one has arrived at the agents, and there no rule change helps, only a different offer.

Fiction Is Chosen

The three questions do not share the same grammar. Every element is regulated, if only where it lies and what state it is in. Every element appears, except where the form prevents it: in blindfold chess the board is specified but cannot be seen. What something counts as is set – or not set. The go stone is a stone and counts as nothing else. Tetris has clear regulation and an unmistakable appearance, but it represents nothing and needs nothing of the kind. LUNA calls this the zero point: the slot is filled, with the value “nothing”. It is a design decision, not a deficiency.

The zero point holds per slot, not per game. Chess sets ascriptions – king, knight, rook – but tells no story; its urgency comes from the rules alone. Zelda sets both: figures with roles and a hero’s journey. And what the corpus leaves open, players often fill themselves: go players say a group “lives” or “dies”. Conversely: what is ascribed but appears nowhere exists only in the designers’ heads.

What Follows: Function, Impression, Meaning

People talking about games often ask: what function does this have? How does it come across? What does it mean? These are good questions, but not questions about specifications. Function, impression and meaning follow from what is specified without being specified themselves. That a counter counts follows from the rules. That the yellow cube is a valuable, scarce resource follows from all three together – and does so before anyone plays.

More follows at the level of the whole game: the depth of chess; the lead that reinforces itself in Monopoly; the impression of Azul compared with Sagrada; what Pandemic says about cooperation in a crisis. The arc a game tends towards – crescendo, wave, plateau – also follows in this way; LUNA calls it the Ludic Ductus.

From this follows a sober rule: one does not design meaning or an arc of tension. One designs specifications and reads off what comes out. One cannot hit it directly, but one can certainly miss it. That is why playtesting is not an extra here but the only means of checking.

From Corpus to Event

The corpus is designed. The process is played – and it runs differently every time, because agents are not components. LUNA describes what arises with four concepts. All four arise in the process and are carried by the agents:

• The Ludic Fabula – the events of the match as they are for one agent. Each has its own: in Werewolf, everyone knows a different part of what happened. One box of Catan has produced thousands of Ludic Fabulae; none of them lies in the box.
• The Ludic Experience – what is experienced: tension, wonder, triumph, togetherness.
• The Ludic Ductus – how the experience unfolds. In the same game of chess, the winner may experience a crescendo and the loser an implosion.
• The Ludic Effectus – what remains afterwards.

None of the four can be specified; all four can be targeted. What designers hope for from them LUNA calls the Ludic Desiderata. So one does not design the experience but the conditions under which the hoped-for experience becomes likely. How much the specifications leave open – from the choreographed course of The Last of Us to the open-generative world of Dwarf Fortress – is itself a design decision.

Where does this come from? The framing goes back to Gregory Bateson (“this is play”); LUNA thus understands play as a temporal, communicative happening rather than as a space behind a boundary, as the metaphor of the “magic circle” suggests. The question “What does it count as?” builds on Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction as make-believe, the Fabula on Russian formalism. The reference axis and the RAF triad are described under concepts/model/, all terms in the term documents under concepts/term/ and their relations in the relation documents under concepts/relation/.