Ludic Fabula

The Ludic Fabula is the chronological-causal whole of the events of a match - or of a series of matches - as they are for one agent. Every agent has their own - spectators included. The fabulae of different agents can be congruent but never identical: the happening, the Ludic Process, is one; the fabulae are many. The reason is not that everyone experiences differently - that is the Ludic Experience - but that the history of events itself is a different one for each.

It has two sources. From the Ludic Sujet comes what is told as set; from the process, what happens. The fabula is therefore not specifically narrative: every chess match has its fabulae too, with turns, crises and resolution - there the sujet stands at the null point, and the fabula arises from the process alone. In a campaign it spans several matches: the fabula of a year of Pandemic Legacy reaches across all the matches of that year.

In everyday language

• “story” (largely): the story a match produces for someone (“what happened to us”). Does not distinguish what the game specifies (Ludic Sujet, in the corpus) from what a match produces (Ludic Fabula, one for each agent); nor the reason for acting from the order of telling.

Place and design access

Place on the axis: AGENT–PROCESS - the fabula arises in the process and is borne by the agent, like Ludic Ductus, Ludic Experience and Ludic Effectus. It has two sides: on the side of the match it is one agent’s fabula; on the side of the game it is the fabula possibility space, the sequences of events a game can bring forth (§10). Every edge says which side it means.

Design access: targetable - one does not set a fabula; one designs the conditions under which certain sequences of events become more likely and checks in playtesting which ones arise. How strongly to steer is itself a design decision. It can be captured as a reconstructable sequence of events; it becomes intersubjectively testable by comparing the fabulae of several agents.

Relations on the axis:

• PROCESS: the Ludic Process is one of the two sources: it informs the fabula about what happens. Every process informs at least one, usually one per agent; every fabula has at least one process, that of a campaign several.
• CORPUS (game side): the Ludic Sujet is the other source: it informs the fabula about what is told as set - at most one sujet per fabula, none in chess. Ludic Regulation and Ludic Organisational Structure span the possibility space of fabulae; every fabula stands under a regulation. Entity, Action, Activity, Objective, Argumentum, Narrational Structure and the View Structure contribute to it, and the narrems carry fictional content to it - none of these is necessary for a fabula. How far the agents’ fabulae diverge is ordered, among other things, by the view structure: who perceives what from where.
• FORM (game side): the Ludic Form spans the possibility space - what can happen at all.
• AGENT–CORPUS (game side): the Ludic Frame limits which sequences of events are coherent within it.
• AGENT (side of the match): every agent contributes to at least one fabula, their own and often those of others. The fabula belongs to them, but it does not determine what they want, feel and how they decide. After the match, fabulae can be compared and merged; the merger is itself a fabula, such as the game master’s.
• AGENT–PROCESS (side of the match): the fabula contributes to the Ludic Effectus - what is told and remembered can have effects beyond the game.
• INTENT (game side): the Ludic Desiderata inform the possibility space: an intended fabula is a design goal.

The fabula does not change the corpus. In legacy games the agents change it, as far as their Ludic Sovereignty reaches - in Pandemic Legacy the players stick on and tear up what the rules allow them to.

Delimitations

Delimitation from Ludic Sujet

Against the Ludic Sujet: the sujet is set in the corpus - the ascriptions of this game in the order in which the corpus sets them and makes them known. The fabula arises per agent, from the sujet and from the process. For Bordwell it is what the viewer constructs from the sujet; in games the second source is added. In The Last of Us the sujet carries far; in chess it stands at the null point.

Delimitation from Ludic Process

Against the Ludic Process: the process is the happening - one per match. The fabulae are what this happening is, as a history of events, for the individual agents - many per match; a campaign’s fabula reaches across several processes. In Werewolf there is one night, but everyone knows a different part of it.

Delimitation from Ludic Experience

Against the Ludic Experience: the fabula says what happened and can be reconstructed; the experience says how it was experienced and can only be reported. Two agents can have congruent fabulae and still experience very different things.

Delimitation from Ludic Ductus

Against the Ludic Ductus: the fabula is the sequence of events, the ductus the shape of experience over time. The same fabula - an equaliser in the last minute - unfolds as a crescendo for one side and as an implosion for the other.

Examples

• Werewolf - one match, many fabulae. The werewolves know whom they chose in the night; the seer knows whom she examined; the other villagers only know who is missing in the morning. The Ludic View Structure determines who sees what. After the match, when the roles are revealed, the fabulae are compared - and often only then merged into one story.
• Chess - the sujet stands at the null point: nothing is told as set. Still, every match has its fabulae, with sacrifice, counter-attack and endgame, from the process alone. Both players know every move; their fabulae are congruent - and yet not the same, for each is the story of one side.
• The Last of Us - the sujet carries far. What is told is set; the fabulae of different players differ above all in the encounters the process generates - where one sneaked, where one fought.
• Pandemic Legacy - a campaign over one game year: each agent’s fabula reaches across all the matches. Between them the players change the corpus as the rules allow them - cards are torn up, cities stay marked; what enters the fabula of this is the story of these changes.
• Dwarf Fortress - open-generative: hardly anything is told as set, and yet players afterwards tell long stories - their fabulae.

Explanation

Imagine you have designed a board game - rules, pieces, board, cards. Now four players sit down at the table and play. What happens is the Ludic Fabula - more precisely: there are four. Who led early? Which alliance formed, and when did it break? Not everyone at the table knows the same about it, especially when cards are hidden. You wrote none of these stories - they happened because your rules, your cards and the players’ decisions worked together.

And here comes the design question: Which stories should your game be able to bring forth? Some games always tell roughly the same story, others a completely different one each time. Both are good design - as long as it is intentional. The question is not “Should my game have a story?” but “How much control do I want over the stories that arise?”

At the end, in the playtest, you ask the decisive question: Did the game bring forth the stories we aimed at? Do the players afterwards talk excitedly about what happened - and do they tell it differently?

Usage context

Dimension	Classification
Phase	Ideation and development: design the possibility space - how wide, how narrow, how strongly steered? · Evaluation: reconstruct and compare the fabulae of the matches - did the stories arise that were aimed at?
Tools	Stack of fabula steering profiles (FA-01 to FA-06) · fabula design worksheet · observation sheet and record for the fabula of whoever observes
Tool type	reference and reflective

Theoretical foundation

• Russian formalism (Shklovsky, Tomashevsky): the pair fabula and sujet - the chronological sequence of events and its narrated arrangement. LUNA adopts it: the fabula stands opposite the Ludic Sujet.
• David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (1985): the fabula is what the viewer constructs from the sujet - the reason it exists per agent.
• Henry Jenkins; Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman: embedded and emergent narrative. In games the fabula has both sources - the sujet and the process; LUNA treats them not as opposites but as two tributaries.
• Jesper Juul; Ian Bogost: Half-Real - half rule system, half fiction; procedural rhetoric - how rules generate meaning. Both touch on how determinations become events.
• Janet Murray; Michael Mateas: agency and dramatic agency - the tension between the agents’ freedom and the coherence of the story; in LUNA a question of the possibility space (§10).

Possibility space

The fabula possibility space is the game’s side: the space of event sequences a game can bring forth. It results from all determinations and belongs to the derived layer - it cannot be set, but it can be missed. It is shaped along two axes: the degree of steering (guided ↔ emergent) and the diversity of the fabulae it brings forth (convergent ↔ diverse). A game can have a wide space and still always produce similar stories.

The stack holds six steering profiles: choreographed · guided-convergent · guided-divergent · emergent-monotonous · emergent-diverse · open-generative. Two fields stay empty: tight steering with high diversity is a contradiction; maximal emergence with low diversity hardly occurs.

The intended fabula is not a separate object but a design goal: what one aims at within the possibility space - the comeback, the game that stays open to the end. In practice it is called the “golden path”. In linear games the sujet carries much of it, in open games the possibility space alone.

The realised fabula is the fabula itself - per agent, reconstructable after the match (§2).