Human Agent Capacitas

Human Agent Capacitas is what a person brings to a Ludic Process in abilities and preconditions - what can they do?: perceive, move, understand, read games, know the subject, deal with others, interpret the design. It is separate from what the person wants (Human Agent Motivation), how they tend to play (Human Agent Habitus) and where they play (Ludic Agent Situation).

It limits what can be executed: the Ludic Form opens up the set of Ludic Operations, capacitas limits it. In this it is the condition of the coupling operation - and the place where accessibility takes hold. It likewise limits what is perceptible and what is comprehensible.

It has a baseline, fairly stable over many matches, and a current state: tiredness, stress, pain or mood shift it. It is not a list of deficits - if a game presupposes abilities its players do not have, it excludes them; that is a fault of the design, not a shortcoming of the players. It holds for humans; for the Ludic Robot its equipment takes its place - what it can perceive and execute.

In everyday language

• “experience” (related): what someone already brings (“experienced players”). Does not distinguish what is lived through during the match from what remains afterwards, nor either from what someone already brings. The term Ludic Experience reads like the everyday word in English; prefix and italics keep the two apart.

Place and design access

Place on the axis: AGENT - what the person brings; it precedes the process and outlasts it.

Design access: addressable - agents are addressable, not controllable; what can be regulated is their action space, not what they bring. Capacitas cannot be designed, but it can be addressed: through the choice of operations, the complexity of the rules, the channels of appearance, the aids a game offers. A game regulates what it demands; what a person can do, it does not determine.

Relations on the axis:

• AGENT–FORM: the Ludic Operation presupposes it - it is the condition of the coupling. The Ludic Form presupposes it too: every form demands certain abilities.
• CORPUS: it limits whether the specifications take hold in the person - what of the Ludic Appearance is perceptible and what of the Ludic Regulation is comprehensible. A rule that is not understood does not take hold.
• AGENT: it spans the space in which the Human Agent Habitus takes shape: what a person can do limits how they can tend to play. It is delimited against Human Agent Motivation.
• AGENT–PROCESS: it limits which Ludic Experience is possible - flow presupposes that demand and ability match. The Ludic Agent Situation modulates it; from the Ludic Effectus it receives feedback - whoever learns through play brings more to the next match.
• INTENT: the addressed agents are described also by their expected abilities; the Ludic Desiderata hold for them.

Delimitations

Delimitation from Human Agent Habitus

Against Human Agent Habitus: ability and custom. Capacitas says what a person could do, habitus how they tend to play. Someone who can calculate quickly does not therefore necessarily play calculatingly. What someone can do limits the range of their habitus but does not determine it.

Delimitation from Human Agent Motivation

Against Human Agent Motivation: ability and will. Capacitas says what a person can do, motivation why they play. Someone who understands all the rules of a strategy game does not therefore want to play it; someone who absolutely wants to join in cannot therefore do everything the game demands.

Delimitation from Ludic Agent Situation

Against Ludic Agent Situation: what the person can do and under what circumstances they play. Tiredness after the working day is a state of capacitas; the noisy train, the ten minutes to the next stop are the situation. The situation modulates capacitas but is not it.

Delimitation from Ludic Operation

Against Ludic Operation: what the person can do and what is executed. Capacitas is what a person brings - strength, fine motor skills, reaction time, perception. The operation is the execution the game demands. Whoever cannot press the key fast enough fails not at the action but at the operation; a different operation for the same action can shift the limit.

Delimitation from Ludic Social Structure

Against Ludic Social Structure: the roles and the people who fill them. The social structure determines which seats and roles there are - teams, hidden roles, one against many. Capacitas says whether the people who take them can fill them. This is a condition of compatibility: a role nobody at the table can play is one role too many.

Examples

One round, three profiles. At the table play an experienced strategist, her twelve-year-old niece and a friend with red-green colour blindness. The strategist reads rules fast and keeps a lot in mind (cognitive, ludic high). The niece is quick and curious, but exception rules unsettle her (ludic medium). The friend cannot tell two of the player colours apart (sensory) - unless the cards also carry symbols. The same game needs different entry points and aids for all three.

Further games:

• Twilight Imperium versus Uno: cognitive and ludic capacity decide who takes on forty pages of rules.
• Celeste: the assist mode slows the game down and makes you invincible - the same action through an operation that demands less motor skill.
• The Last of Us Part II: dozens of accessibility settings - subtitles, contrast, aim assistance, audio cues - for sensory and motor capacities.
• Codenames: demands vocabulary and general knowledge - domain and language capacity.
• Dixit: demands interpreting images and reading allusions - aesthetic capacity.
• After a long working day the same group reaches for a lighter game - the current state shifts the baseline.

Explanation

Before you design a game, you should know what your players can do - not what they want and not how they tend to play, but what they bring in abilities, experience and preconditions.

Imagine a round at the table: the experienced strategist takes in the game at once. Her twelve-year-old niece is quick, but the many exceptions confuse her. A friend cannot tell two player colours apart. All three play the same game - it must work for all three.

Capacitas has seven sides: what can your players perceive, do physically, manage mentally? How much play experience do they bring? What do they know about the subject? How do they deal with others? Can they read the visual language of your game? Important: capacitas is not a list of shortcomings. It is about designing your game to fit the people who play it. And it fluctuates: after a long day one can do less than in the morning.

Usage context

Dimension	Classification
Phase	Ideation (primary: target group, accessibility, complexity - in the agent persona); development (do the prototypes fit the expected abilities?); evaluation (expected against actual abilities in playtesting)
Tool type	generative and structuring - seven cards of the subdimensions (CAP-01 to CAP-07) and the cross-cutting card on the current state (CAP-08) in the stack stacks/agent/human/capacitas/; reference: tabulae/worksheet/agent-persona-worksheet.md

Theoretical foundation

• Sen, Nussbaum, capability approach: capabilities - what someone could do - versus functionings - what someone does; this corresponds to capacitas and habitus. LUNA adopts the idea without the normative superstructure.
• Universal design, WCAG, Game Accessibility Guidelines: the basis for the sensory and the motor subdimension - designing at the limits of what people can do.
• Piaget; Vygotsky, zone of proximal development: age-dependent complexity; good play lies just above what someone can already do.
• Zagal, Ludoliteracy (2010): play experience as an ability of its own - conventions that newcomers first have to learn; the basis of the ludic subdimension.
• Dewey, Art as Experience; Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing: aesthetic perception as a learnable ability, to be distinguished from sensory perception.

Subdimensions

Subdimension	Guiding question	what for in design
Sensory (CAP-01)	What can the person perceive?	channels of appearance, accessibility
Motor (CAP-02)	What can they do physically?	operations, choice of form and input
Cognitive (CAP-03)	What can they process mentally?	complexity of the rules, information, introduction
Ludic (CAP-04)	How much play experience do they bring?	entry barrier, tutorial, level
Domain (CAP-05)	What do they know about the subject?	education and serious games, the effectus aimed at
Social (CAP-06)	How do they deal with others?	social structure, team size
Aesthetic (CAP-07)	What can they read in the design?	legibility of appearance - visual language, sound, narrative modes, style

Current state (CAP-08, across all): tiredness, stress, pain and mood shift the baseline. Good design reckons with this - adjustable difficulty, adaptable length, several channels for the same information.

Sensory capacity asks what is physically perceptible; aesthetic capacity what of it can be interpreted. Ludic capacity is knowledge of the conventions one brings from other games - that a heart counts lives, what a minimap shows, where a card states its cost. Interpreting how a particular game designs them is aesthetic: that the heart counts lives one knows from other games; that the cracked heart means poison in this game one reads from its visual language.