Why LUNA?

The Problem

Talking about games is easy. Talking about games in a way that turns into design decisions is surprisingly hard. “It’s no fun”, “the mechanics are good”, “it doesn’t feel right” – sentences like these are said in every development team and every seminar room, and they lead nowhere: they name an experience, but no point of intervention. Is the problem in the rules? In what you see and hear? In what the game stands for? With the players, who expected something else?

In teaching, this gets worse. Anyone who teaches the design and development of games, or uses games as a learning method, has to discuss, compare and assess drafts – in a way that lets students translate the critique into their next iteration. Without a shared vocabulary, feedback remains a matter of taste.

What Already Exists

There is no shortage of thinking tools: analytical models that dissect games into layers, extensive collections of design patterns, a rich body of game studies literature. Much of it is strong – and LUNA visibly builds on it. But three gaps typically remain open. The people who play are either left out or lumped in with the game, even though they cannot be designed. Appearance and fiction run alongside as “aesthetics” or “theme” instead of being analysable on equal footing with the rules. And almost all of it exists as text – as a book or paper, not as a tool a seminar group can work with at the table.

What LUNA Does Differently

A clear boundary of responsibility. LUNA distinguishes what can be specified in a game from the agents – the humans, animals or machines that play. What they can and may do in the game can be designed; what they want, feel and how they decide can be addressed, but not controlled. This boundary sounds banal, but it changes design work: it forces the question of which abilities, habits and motivations a draft presupposes – instead of assuming them tacitly. A game like Werewolf stands and falls with the group’s willingness to bluff; whoever overlooks that will wonder why the evening dragged.

Three questions, on equal footing. LUNA asks three questions of every element of a game: How is it regulated? How does it appear? What does it count as? The answers can be specified independently of one another, and none takes precedence. “It doesn’t feel right” thus becomes decomposable: do regulation, appearance and ascription fail to fit together – and is that a mistake or a deliberate contrast? Or is it not the game at all, but what the players bring with them? A matter of taste becomes an answerable design question.

A language that survives borders. The core terms are Latin-rooted and identical in every language. For international teams and multilingual teaching this means: no losses in translation, no debates about everything “mechanisms” can mean in German. At the same time, LUNA deliberately avoids military metaphors and exclusionary jargon.

A framework you can touch. LUNA exists not only as documentation but as a material system: card stacks, worksheets, boards. You do not have to have worked through a book to design with it – you enter through the material, and the terms come with use.

Machine-readable by design. The same knowledge base from which the materials are produced also exists as a multilingual knowledge graph. AI-supported tools build on it – for instance a teaching assistant that answers design questions along LUNA’s terms instead of telling you just anything.

Where does this come from? LUNA is being developed in the European Game Science Lab and connects game design practice, game science and education; the theoretical foundations (among them Bateson’s framing of play, Walton’s theory of fiction and Leontiev’s activity theory) are documented in the term documents of the knowledge base. A scholarly publication is in preparation.