LUNA at a Glance

Whoever creates a game makes hundreds of decisions: Which rules apply? What can the players do? How does it feel – and what is it actually about? Most of these decisions are made intuitively, and when a team talks about them, the words are often missing: “It somehow plays sluggishly” is a real problem, but not a workable one.

The LUNA Framework is a practice-oriented toolset that starts exactly here. It gives the conception, development and analysis of games and play-based formats a shared, precise language – and a material system for hands-on work in workshops and courses. LUNA is being developed in the European Game Science Lab, an Erasmus+ partnership between DE:HIVE at HTW Berlin, IMT Lucca, the University of Florence, the BUG Game Lab at Bahçeşehir University and the Lithuanian Innovation Centre.

The Core Idea

LUNA thinks of games from the happening. Play takes place when someone frames a happening as play – “Let’s play”, the arranged match, tag in the schoolyard. This happening is called the Process. What is specified for it – rules, material, appearance, what things represent – is called the Corpus: the box with its rulebook, the code of an app. The condition under which it is played – at the table, at the screen, on the pitch – is called the Form. And whoever plays is an Agent: a human, an animal, a machine. Agent – Process – Corpus – Form: this is the reference axis by which LUNA orders everything.

Agents bring abilities, habits, motivations and expectations. What they can do in the game can be designed; what they want and feel can be addressed but not controlled. Werewolf gets by with a handful of rules because it lets the dynamics of the group do the work; Pandemic generates pressure to cooperate through its rules. In both cases the game only comes into being when specifications and players meet.

Add to this a second figure of thought: LUNA asks three questions of every element of a game. How is it regulated? How does it appear? What does it count as? A hotel in Monopoly multiplies the rent, it is a little red block, and it counts as a hotel. The three answers – Ludic Regulation, Ludic Appearance, Ludic Fiction, together the RAF triad – can be specified independently of one another. Precisely where they align or deliberately clash, a design succeeds or fails.

A Language That Stays the Same Everywhere

LUNA’s core terms are Latin-rooted and remain identical in every language: Ludic Process, Ludic Corpus, Ludic Experience, Human Agent Motivation. They are deliberately not everyday words, because everyday words cut things up differently in each language: English separates play and game, which German gathers under Spiel. A team in Berlin, Lucca or Istanbul thus talks about the same things with the same words – without losses in translation and without the military or technical jargon that marks parts of the games literature.

What You Work With

LUNA is not a textbook but a toolkit: card stacks provide impulses and building blocks (mechanisms, player actions, moods, arcs of tension), worksheets record design decisions, boards explain concepts and provoke fundamental questions. Process models show different paths through a design process – from a mechanism-driven to an experience-driven start. The materials are made for workshops and seminars: you lay cards on the table, combine, discard, document.

Who It Is For

LUNA addresses students and educators – in game design as well as in disciplines that want to use games as a method – and designers who want to grasp their craft more systematically. No prior experience in professional game development is required.