Ludic Action

A Ludic Action is a single act in a game - what happens: moving, jumping, hiding, observing, shooting, drawing a card, trading, building. It is one of the two element bearers alongside the Ludic Entity: the entity says what is there, the action what happens. Determinations adhere to it - regulation, appearance, ascription -, and they hold for a Ludic Process. Actions are formulated as verbs.

An action brings about a change of state in the match; this effect belongs to the action itself. It contributes to a Ludic Activity - the field of action such as hunting, building, trading - and can serve the fulfilment of a Ludic Objective. The assignment is not exclusive: “shooting” belongs to hunting, to fighting and to defending.

An action is triggered by the agent (agent-initiated), initiated by Ludic Regulation - at a threshold, through a trigger in the game - or reactively, in response to another action. Initiation concerns the trigger, not the act. Which actions exist is determined by the corpus, what they bring about by Ludic Regulation; which are actually open to an agent in a state of the process is that agent’s action space. How an action is carried out depends on the form - that is the Ludic Operation.

In everyday language

• “mechanic” (related): a possibility for action (“the jump mechanic”). Does not distinguish the transferable pattern from the single rule, the sequence and the domain with feedback; nor the regulation in the corpus from the action in the process. Named combinations such as Worker Placement are also called “mechanics” but are not Ludic Mechanisms.
• “play” (largely): a single move (“a clever play”). Does not distinguish the whole happening from the single move. Play against game is not a LUNA distinction: what happens is the Ludic Process, what is specified for it the Ludic Corpus.

Place and design access

Place on the axis: CORPUS - the action is a bearer in the corpus. The corpus determines which actions exist; the agent carries them out in the process.

Design access: designable - which actions are available, what they bring about, how they appear and what they count as. Which action an agent chooses is not designable.

Relations on the axis:

• CORPUS: Ludic Regulation determines at the action what it brings about - Ludic Rules link a constellation with an effect, Ludic Procedures order rules into a sequence. A Ludic Mechanism does not determine which actions are possible; it says what follows from them under which conditions, and is implemented by rules and procedures. The action acts on Ludic Entities, contributes to Ludic Activities and serves Ludic Objectives. The Ludic Temporal Structure organises it, and it takes place within its segments; the Ludic Spatial Structure opens up space for it. Appearance and fiction determine how it appears and what it counts as.
• AGENT–FORM: the Ludic Operation carries out the action under the conditions of a form: “press button A” and “kick with the leg” trigger the same action. The form opens up the set of operations, Human Agent Capacitas limits it - this is where accessibility becomes modellable.
• AGENT: the agent performs the action. Following Leontiev, it stands at the level of action; what the corpus offers is the task (Ludic Objective), what lies with the agent is the adopted or self-set one.
• PROCESS: in the process the actions are performed; they form its sequence of events.
• AGENT–PROCESS: from this sequence of events each agent’s Ludic Fabula arises.

The trias at this concept

At the action “take a piece out of the game”:

Regulation - what the action brings about: the piece leaves the game state. Appearance - how it becomes perceptible: the piece is taken off the board, vanishes in an animation, explodes with a sound. Ascription - what it counts as: killing, banishing, rescuing, sacrificing, freezing.

The same regulation carries different ascriptions; where the three diverge, coherence costs arise - unintended or as deliberate contrast.

Process formula. The determinations adhere to the action and hold for a process:

A Ludic Action has a Ludic Regulation for a Ludic Process. A Ludic Action has a Ludic Appearance for a Ludic Process. A Ludic Action has a Ludic Fiction for a Ludic Process.

The prepositional construction is binding; the possessive genitive is to be avoided.

Delimitations

Delimitation from Ludic Activity

Against the Ludic Activity: single act and field of action. The activity says what one does - hunting, building, trading -, the action what happens in detail: aiming, shooting, pursuing. The activity is neither a bearer nor a pattern; it is regulated through its actions. Actions contribute to activities without being their parts, and the same action can serve many activities.

Delimitation from Ludic Mechanism

Against the Ludic Mechanism: doing and pattern. The action is what happens - bidding, buying, trading, jumping. The mechanism is the pattern that determines under which conditions what follows from it. It does not determine which actions are possible: an auction is a mechanism, bidding and buying are actions that exist without it too. The auction says who wins the lot at which bid. A mechanism is implemented by Ludic Rules and Ludic Procedures, and they determine at the actions.

Delimitation from Ludic Operation

Against the Ludic Operation: what happens and how it is carried out. “Shooting” is an action; “press the space bar”, “pull the trigger”, “kick with the foot” are operations by which it is carried out. In LUNA the boundary runs firmly along the form, not along the agent’s practice: even one who hits without looking is shooting - the key remains an operation.

Delimitation from Ludic Objective

Against the Ludic Objective: act and task. The action brings something about; the objective says what for - a task with a condition of fulfilment. An action serves an objective when its effect contributes to fulfilment: opening the door serves the task “reach the final boss”. Both are to be distinguished from the agent’s drive, Human Agent Motivation.

Examples

• Chess: moving, capturing, castling - actions concerning the pieces; castling is an action with two pieces.
• Football: activities attacking and defending; actions passing, shooting, dribbling, tackling. A direct shot, a bouncing shot and a header are different operations of the same action “shooting”.
• Agricola: placing workers, taking resources, sowing fields - actions of the activity “running the farm”; what follows from them is determined by the pattern worker placement, a named combination of placement, priority and schedule.
• Catan: gathering, building, trading as activities with overlapping actions; the same action “hand in a resource” belongs to trading and to building.
• Super Mario: jumping - button A on the gamepad, a jerk of the controller with motion control: one action, two operations.
• “No laughing”: pulling faces - an action whose operations are carried out by the body alone.
• Levelling up: the level rises as soon as experience points reach a threshold - an action initiated by Ludic Regulation.

Explanation

In every game the game offers the players actions - the single acts: shooting, moving, drawing a card, hiding. They are the building blocks of what one does in the game. An action can serve many purposes: “moving” belongs to hunting as well as to exploring. And it can serve a task - opening the next door, collecting ten gold coins, reaching the final boss.

At every action you can determine what it brings about, how it looks and sounds, and what it counts as. How an action is carried out in practice - a button, a throw, a jump - depends on the form of play. That is the level of operations.

Usage context

Dimension	Classification
Phase	Ideation (on a par: which acts exist?); development (primary: the activity/action sheet in the element worksheet, regulation, operations); evaluation (action-space analysis)
Tool type	generative (48 action cards AC-01 to AC-48, two guide cards AC-49 and AC-50; eight impact-domain cards AC-51 to AC-58 structure the stack) and reference (the activity/action sheet in tabulae/worksheet/element-worksheet.md §3.2)

Theoretical foundation

• Leontiev, Activity, Consciousness, and Personality: the triad activity, action, operation. LUNA adopts it as linkable levels rather than a fixed hierarchy - an action can serve several activities and objectives and is carried out differently in each form. Second deviation: in Leontiev an act migrates to the operation level with growing practice; in LUNA the boundary runs firmly along the form. The abandonment of an awareness criterion in the definition rests on this.
• Juul, Half-Real: the distinction between rules and fictional meaning - a precursor of the triad.
• Sicart, “Defining Game Mechanics”: the delimitation of mechanics and actions, starting point for distinguishing mechanism and action.
• Norman, The Design of Everyday Things: gulf of execution and gulf of evaluation - applicable to the operation level and to accessibility.

Initiation and effect

Initiation (field initiation_type): agent-initiated · initiated by Ludic Regulation · reactive. It says who sets the trigger, not what the action is: teleporting can be triggered by the agent - or by a portal set by the rules.

Effect: every action card carries a value in the field impact_domain (spatial, economic, social, informational, temporal, creative, destructive, regulatory). The stack is structured by eight impact domains (locomotion, manipulation, conflict, communication, perception, resource, cognition, transformation); the field value is derived from them, not one to one. Which division holds is not yet determined.

Core and support: whether an action is indispensable for an activity or only supports it is marked by the designers per activity in the activity/action sheet (guide card AC-49). It is not a property of the action - the same action can be core for one activity and support for another.