Ludic Corpus

The Ludic Corpus is the body of determinations that hold for a Ludic Process, together with the material in which they are laid down - in a board game, for instance, the material together with the entire set of rules. The determinations are mostly made beforehand, and by virtue of Ludic Sovereignty also during the process: the house rule, the improvising game master, the Ludic Objective an agent sets for themselves. What distinguishes it from the Ludic Process is status, not time: a determination states what is to hold; an event is what happens.

The Ludic Corpus is optional. A process without a corpus is free play: the agents determine what is to hold while they play, and they have full Ludic Sovereignty. Corpus threshold: determinations become part of the Ludic Corpus as soon as they carry beyond the match - as soon, that is, as a second process could be started from them, by the same or by other agents. This is not a matter of counting: a single determination can achieve it (“the ball must not touch the ground”), whereas several rules invented and discarded along the way do not. Once a corpus is present, the determinations made during the process are added to it.

In everyday language

• “game” (largely): The game as a designed whole that one buys, explains and designs (“the game has elegant rules”). Does not distinguish the body of specifications (Ludic Corpus) from what happens when it is played (Ludic Process). English separates game and play, but not along the same line as LUNA.

Place and design access

Place on the axis: CORPUS - the Ludic Corpus is the quantity CORPUS itself, the root of its branch: the body at which design takes place. All determinations - regulation, appearance, ascription - and the material in which they are laid down belong to it.

Design access: designable - what is designed is the determination, including the appearance of the material: “the die is red” is a determination. Found material - the ordinary deck of cards on which a new game builds - belongs to the body without having been designed. What is controlled is not the corpus but compliance with its regulation: this is taken over by a controlling instance - another agent (the referee, the game master, the fellow players), a machine such as the chess clock, or an algorithm -, or the material makes breaking the rule impossible: the disc in Connect Four drops down.

Relations on the axis:

• CORPUS: Ludic Regulation, Ludic Appearance and Ludic Fiction are part of the corpus, none ranked above or below the others (§4). Bearers, activities and patterns stand in the corpus by their place, without an edge to it. The corpus is not the sum of the three: it also includes the material.
• FORM: every corpus stands under at least one Ludic Form, the medial, material and interactional condition under which a game is realised. It spans the space of possibilities for corpora: a digital game can keep track of states continuously where an analogue one would founder on bookkeeping effort; a head game founders on cognitive overload long before it founders on its rules.
• PROCESS: the corpus spans the space of possibilities for processes - which courses it allows. It does not constitute the process: what happens becomes play only when at least one agent frames it so. A corpus that merely lies there is not yet a game. Many processes are possible from one corpus; a process has at most one. The process itself does not change the corpus: what happens determines nothing.
• AGENT: the corpus addresses the agents and regulates their action space; what they want, what they feel and how they decide, it does not determine. Agents are addressable, not controllable; what can be regulated is their action space - what they can do in play, not what they want or feel (fundamental design asymmetry). Whoever does not want to play, does not play.
• AGENT–CORPUS: only the agents can change the corpus: they act on it by determining, as far as their Ludic Sovereignty reaches - beforehand or during the match: house rule, agreement, variant; in Pandemic Legacy the torn-up card, for which the meta-regulation gives the authority. The corpus calls up content frames - Ludic Frames, cultural schemata of interpretation by which the agents read what happens; a frame takes effect when the agents know the schema. The corpus does not set the play frame; it can invite it.

The trias at this concept

The Ludic Corpus determines in three ways, at the same bearers - Entity, Action, the positions of the four coordinate structures and the Operation. In Carcassonne, at a meeple in a city:

Regulation - how it is regulated (Ludic Regulation): it scores points when the city is completed. Appearance - how it appears (Ludic Appearance): a small wooden figure in a player colour. Ascription - what is ascribed to it (Ludic Fiction): it counts as a knight as long as it stands in the city.

Each of the three can be set on its own; where they diverge, coherence costs arise - the room for design, not a fault. Function, impression and meaning are derived from them, not a fourth member. A corpus can hold one of the ways at the zero point: Go ascribes nothing to its stones.

Delimitations

Delimitation from Ludic Process

Against the Ludic Process: determination and event. The process answers when something is a game: what happens and is framed as play by at least one agent. The corpus answers what is to hold for it. What separates the two is not time but status: a house rule agreed in the middle of a match is a determination and belongs to the corpus; that someone breaks it is an event in the process. The process is constitutive, the corpus optional.

Delimitation from Ludic Form

Against the Ludic Form: body and condition. The form answers under which condition a game is realised - analogue, digital, performative, hybrid. The corpus is what is determined and laid down under that condition. The material belongs to the corpus: board, pieces and rulebook are part of the body; that precisely this material comes into question - cardboard and wood at the table, pixels and computing power on the screen - is conditioned by the form.

Examples

• Chess: board, pieces and the rules of the world chess federation - a corpus from which matches have arisen for centuries. The chess clock belongs to the material and is at the same time the controlling instance for thinking time.
• Crazy Eights with a house rule: the ordinary deck of cards is found material, the rules of the game and the group’s house rule are determinations. The house rule is added to the corpus, by virtue of the sovereignty the group grants itself.
• Pandemic Legacy: the players change the corpus during the match, by virtue of the authority the meta-regulation gives them - stickers, torn-up cards, new rules from sealed boxes. The next match begins with a changed corpus.
• Tabletop role-playing game: rulebook and adventure are laid down; during the session the game master determines what holds - a side room, a guard, a check. That too belongs to the corpus.
• Tag in the schoolyard: the children invent rules and discard them again - free play, not yet a corpus. If one of them says the next day, “Let’s play tag again, whoever touches the fence is safe”, one is present (corpus threshold).
• Digital game: program code, data and graphics are material; what they determine - values, rules, appearances, ascriptions - is the corpus. A patch that lowers a weapon’s damage changes it between matches.

Explanation

Everything that holds for a game, and everything in which it is laid down, we call the Ludic Corpus: the rules and values, how the game looks, what something in it means - and the material in which all this resides, from the board to the program code. Usually the corpus is in place before play begins. But it can also grow during play: a house rule your group agrees on, or what the game master determines on the spot.

A corpus alone is not yet a game - it only becomes effective when someone plays. And not every game needs one: in free play you determine things while you play. That becomes a corpus only once it can be repeated - once you or others could play by it again tomorrow.