RAF triad

The RAF triad is the relation between the three terms Ludic Regulation, Ludic Appearance and Ludic Fiction: three questions to be asked of every element of a game - How is it regulated? How does it appear? What does it count as? All three are determinations of the Ludic Corpus; the triad is not a genus of which they would be cases.

Overview

Three questions can be asked of every element of a game:

	Question	Place at the element	Term
R	How is it regulated?	regulation	Ludic Regulation
A	How does it appear?	appearance	Ludic Appearance
F	What does it count as? - What is ascribed to it?	ascription	Ludic Fiction

The same element, three answers:

Element	How is it regulated?	How does it appear?	What does it count as?
the knight in chess	moves two squares straight and one to the side, may jump	a wooden piece with a horse’s head	as a knight, a rider
a wooden cube in a building game	counts as one unit, is scarce, can be traded	yellow, angular, small	as gold
the night phase in Werewolf	everyone closes their eyes; the werewolves secretly choose a victim	the narrator announces it in a lowered voice	as night, in which the werewolves prowl
the spikes in Super Mario	touching them costs a life	pointed, metallic	as a trap
the Go stone	is placed, not moved; without liberties it is captured	a black or white lens	as nothing other than a stone - zero point

For teaching, this three-step is enough: “What does it do? - How does it appear? - What does it count as?” It can be spoken in three languages and needs no Latin term (luna-architecture.md §2.1).

The three members

All three are determinations of the Ludic Corpus - three ways in which the corpus determines, at a bearer, what holds for a Ludic Process. All three are in the singular (mass terms, naming-rules.md §6) and are process words - regulare, apparere, fingere: they name a being-determined, not a result.

Ludic Regulation - a regulating determination: it permits, constrains or conditions. It determines what holds, not what follows from it. Examples: hand limit 7 · the chess clock · the pawn moves one square forward · offside. Regulation regulates, it does not control: whether the agents comply is checked by a controlling instance - referee, fellow players, chess clock, algorithm - or by the material itself, like the disc in Connect Four that drops down (luna-architecture.md §1).

Ludic Appearance - a determination of appearing: a perceptible property on a channel. Six channels: visual, auditory, haptic, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory. Examples: the tile in Azul gleams, clacks and lies heavy in the hand · in Rez a hit is sound, flash of light and vibration at once · Limbo is black and grey across every element. Appearance is not graphics: a game also appears through sound, weight and self-motion.

Ludic Fiction - a fictional truth: what is to be imagined of an element, what it counts as. Examples: the wooden cube counts as gold · in Monopoly the corner square counts as a jail · in Wii Sports the arm movement counts as a stroke · in Civilization a turn counts as a decade. Fiction is not narrative: the narrative sequence is a pattern of fiction (Ludic Narrational Structure), not fiction itself. A game without a story can be rich in ascriptions - the knight, the rook, the king.

Ascribing is more than naming. Whoever calls a wooden cube “gold” brings in a field: valuable, scarce, coveted. Gold is the ascribed Ludic Narrem; valuable and scarce are implied - nobody set them, they follow. With the field come expectations of the regulation; if it does not meet them, friction arises (see joints and coherence).

Distinction from the “counts as” of the rules. The piece of wood counts as a king and may therefore move; the handball counts as a foul. A “counts as” that carries rights, duties or valuations is regulation, not ascription (Searle; luna-architecture.md §2.2). In chess both lie on the same piece: the right to move and that it is to be imagined as a king.

What the triad claims

“Triad” names a relation between three terms, not a genus. The three are not classified - not as registers, levels or clusters (decision 2026-09-16), because the superordinate genus of which they would be cases does not exist: they are not built in parallel.

Four statements:

common object	All three hit the same bearer. All three questions are to be asked of every element.
completeness	There is no fourth place. Function, impression and meaning are derived, not the fourth member.
independence with coherence costs	Each of the three can be set on its own. Where they diverge, coherence costs arise - that is design latitude, not an error.
no ranking	R-A-F is the order of the three questions, not an order of the matter.

What it does not claim: no levels stacked on top of one another, no ladder from the simple to the composite, no parallelism of construction.

Common misconceptions

Misconception	Correct
”The triad is three levels of a game.”	They are three questions to every element. The older three-level principle has been superseded by the architecture; whether the three are levels, registers or clusters has no longer been asked since v0.6.
”The first question is: what is its function?”	Function is a result: “it counts” is aggregated, the determination is value = one unit. The question is How is it regulated?
”The third question is: what does it mean?”	Meaning is the synthesis of all three. The question is What does it count as?
”Regulation is the most important.”	No ranking. That every element has a regulation is a statement about the zero point, not about rank.
”Unwritten rules are implicit regulation.”	Unwritten norms are not in the corpus; they are cultural knowledge of the agents. Explicitness is not a coordinate (luna-architecture.md §2.3).

The bearers

Determinations adhere to bearers. There are six, plus the Operation (luna-architecture.md §3):

Bearer	Question	Kind
Ludic Entity	What is there?	element
Ludic Action	What happens?	element
Ludic Temporal Structure	when?	coordinate structure, at its places
Ludic Spatial Structure	where?	coordinate structure, at its places
Ludic Social Structure	with whom?	coordinate structure, at its places
Ludic View Structure	from where?	coordinate structure, at its places
Ludic Operation	carried out how?	coupling (Form ∩ Capacitas), bearer of all three terms

With coordinate structures the three terms take hold at the places, not at the structure as a whole: a round structure has no appearance, the phase change has one - the gong. For structures the question “How does it appear?” becomes “How can it be recognised?”.

The Ludic Activity is not a bearer. It bundles actions by subject - hunting, building, trading -; its determinations adhere to these actions and entities. Regulation does, however, determine which activities a game offers and when an agent can pursue them (luna-architecture.md §3).

The process formula: “A Ludic Entity has a Ludic Regulation for a Ludic Process” - likewise appearance and fiction, likewise at every bearer. The determination adheres to the bearer and holds for a process.

Six bearers × three terms yield eighteen basic questions, plus three at the operation. That is why the triad works as a tool: it makes the questions to a game completely enumerable - as far as determinations of a value are concerned (see the two forms of determination).

How the three are built

The three terms are not parallel. This follows from the subject matter, not from a gap (luna-architecture.md §4, §5).

Two forms of determination. A determination of a value sets a value - this bearer has this value on this dimension. A rule links - if this constellation obtains, this effect occurs. Only regulation has both:

Term	Determination of a value	Rule	Mode of composition	transferable · game-specific
Regulation	Ludic Specification - half-time = 45 min	Ludic Rule - ball over the line → goal	conditional chaining	Mechanism, Organisational Structure · Rule, Specification, Procedure
Appearance	a Ludic Appearance - the die is red	-	none: appearances blend into an impression	techniques (material Resonance Tuning) · the appearance of this game
Fiction	an ascription - the die counts as blood; its content is a Ludic Narrem	- (but: an ascription can be bound to a condition of validity)	aggregation of sense	Narrem, Argumentum, Narrational Structure · ascription, Sujet

Consequence for design: balancing changes specifications, redesign changes rules. And because rules depend on constellations whose number does not follow from the ontology, rule design cannot be done by filling in a matrix.

The condition of validity: in Carcassonne the same meeple counts as a knight in the city, as a highwayman on the road, as a monk in the monastery. The condition - where it stands - is established by the regulation; the ascription itself brings nothing about.

The zero point

A place at the zero point is occupied - with the value “nothing” (luna-architecture.md §2.4). The three terms have their zero point differently, and the grammar of the three questions follows from that:

Term	Zero point at the element	so
Regulation	does not exist - every element is at least specified: position, extent, state	one describes the regulation
Appearance	conditional - only where the form prevents it: the board in blindfold chess	one describes the appearance
Fiction	chosen - the normal case	one sets fictional truths or not

The zero point of fiction holds per place, not per game: chess sets ascriptions (king, knight) and has no Argumentum; Go has neither; Zelda has all. Zero point does not mean meaningless: the Go stone is valuable in this position, lost in that one - this follows from the regulation. And a zero point in the corpus does not forbid an ascription in the process: Go players say a group “lives” - an emergent ascription by the agents, not a determination of the corpus.

Joints and coherence

At every bearer two determinations meet at a joint. The coherence mode says how: the one confirms the expectations the other raises - congruent -, breaks them - contrastive - or leaves them open - open.

Joint	Question	Examples
appearance ↔ regulation	Does the appearance show what the element does?	congruent: the spikes in Super Mario; open: the knight piece, which does not show how it moves
appearance ↔ fiction	Does the appearance confirm what is ascribed?	contrastive: the smiling flower that counts as a villain (Undertale)
fiction ↔ regulation	Does the regulation deliver on what is ascribed?	contrastive: the jail in Monopoly, late in the game the safest place; ludonarrative dissonance, where the story says “save the village” and the game rewards points
channel ↔ channel (within appearance)	Do seeing, hearing, feeling of the same element agree?	Azul, Rez

Measured at the joint, adjusted in the term that answers. The mode is a feature of the individual game and element, not of the relation between the terms.

What follows from the triad without being part of it - the derived layer (luna-architecture.md §6). It cannot be set, but it can be missed, and it needs no run through a match:

derived	arises from
function	the regulations
impression	the appearances
meaning	all three
implied fictional truths	the ascriptions and their field
pattern legibility	the three terms at a pattern

Coordinates

Each term is described along the same coordinates; the values differ (luna-architecture.md §2.3).

Coordinate	Regulation	Appearance	Fiction
own axis	mode: permission · constraint · condition	channel: the six channels	kind of ascription: designated · culturally conventional · agreed
form	determination of a value or rule	determination of a value only	determination of a value only, also with a condition of validity
object	the bearers; reflexively the meta-regulation (“Are house rules allowed?“)	the bearers; no reflexive object	the bearers; reflexively the embedded fiction (the Gwent cards in The Witcher 3)
phase of validity	initial · ongoing · terminal	initial · ongoing · terminal	initial · ongoing · terminal
coherence mode	at the joint with fiction	at its three joints	at the joint with regulation
further	-	iconicity (mimetic · stylised · abstract), dynamics (course; reactive feedback quality)	ascribed · implied

Pawn promotion shows all three in the ongoing phase at once: the pawn henceforth moves like a queen (regulation), is exchanged for a queen (appearance) and counts as a queen (fiction) - the last under the condition of validity that the regulation has promoted it.

Channels, modes and kinds of ascription are value ranges, not terms (decision 2026-09-30): a value to filter by is enough; a node of their own is not needed.

Place and design access

The triad has its place on CORPUS: it describes what is determined. The bearers likewise stand on CORPUS, with one exception - the Ludic Operation lies on AGENT–FORM and is nevertheless a bearer of all three.

The triad does not carry the agent. Regulation addresses the agent and regulates its behaviour, but regulation, appearance and ascription do not adhere to the agent; they adhere to the place it occupies - the role in the Social Structure. What an agent is and brings along is described by the agent concepts (framework concept reference axis).

The Ludic Form conditions what the triad can yield: which channels can be addressed, how the regulation can be enforced, where an appearance stands at the zero point. The side of enactment - Fabula, Experience, Ductus, Effectus - lies on AGENT–PROCESS and is not part of the triad; the triad is one cause of what arises there. The direction of diagnosis builds on this (luna-architecture.md §10): a symptom in enactment - “Why does nobody play the mage?” - is broken down into the three questions to the element, plus the coupling (Operation) and the agent.