Ludic Sovereignty

Ludic Sovereignty is the authority of a Ludic Agent to make or change determinations - who may change the determinations? What is meant is not the course within the rules; all agents shape that. What is meant are the determinations themselves: introducing a house rule, deciding as game master what holds right now, setting oneself a Ludic Objective. What an agent determines by virtue of their sovereignty is added to the Ludic Corpus. Where there is no corpus, the agents determine everything themselves: that is free play, with full sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a spectrum, from none - the determinations are fixed - to full, and it lies with one agent or is shared. Its scope is set by the corpus: that a determination can be changed is said by Ludic Regulation in its meta-regulation; who may change it is said by sovereignty.

It is type-neutral: a Ludic Robot can have it too.

Place and design access

Place on the axis: AGENT–CORPUS - an authority that lies with the agent and is directed at the corpus; its scope is set in the corpus.

Design access: addressable - agents are addressable, not controllable; what can be regulated is their action space, and it includes what they may change in the determinations. Designers grant sovereignty and limit it through the meta-regulation. Whether and how the agents exercise it, they do not determine.

Relations on the axis:

• AGENT: sovereignty requires a Ludic Agent; not every agent has it. It is delimited against their Human Agent Habitus: authority against inclination - how an agent deals with it is shaped by their habitus.
• CORPUS: the agent determines as far as their sovereignty reaches. It corresponds with Ludic Regulation: regulation says in its meta-regulation what can be changed, sovereignty who may change it. It authorises agents to set themselves Ludic Objectives or to change posed ones; an objective is posed or set by virtue of one authority - the shared authority of a group is one as well. The Ludic Temporal Structure spans the space of possibilities of sovereignty as far as the ending is concerned: if it is fixed - a value, an event -, the agents have no authority over it; Endless leaves it to them. Saving and loading, by contrast, are acting within the rules - action space, not sovereignty.
• PROCESS: determinations made in the process are determinations like those made beforehand; what distinguishes them is status, not time.
• AGENT–PROCESS: whoever may change determinations - meta-regulation, legacy, house rule - modulates the game’s side of the Ludic Ductus: they change what the course tends towards without fixing it.

Delimitations

Delimitation from Ludic Regulation

Against Ludic Regulation: changeability and authority. That a rule is changeable is determined by regulation - in its meta-regulation. Who may change it is stated by sovereignty. The two are not the same: a game can provide for house rules without giving a particular person the authority, and a game master can have authority over rules the game does not mark as changeable.

Delimitation from Ludic Agent

Against the Ludic Agent: acting, overseeing, determining. Every agent shapes the course, through their decisions within the rules. Some oversee and interpret the rules - the referee, the game master; that is participation in the regulation dimension. Sovereignty belongs to whoever may change the determinations themselves. The referee in professional football interprets but changes no rule; on the street pitch everyone changes the rules together without anyone blowing a whistle.

Delimitation from Human Agent Habitus

Against Human Agent Habitus: authority and inclination. Sovereignty says how much an agent may change; the authority stance of their habitus, how they deal with rules - rule-abiding to rule-creative. Whoever has full sovereignty and is rule-abiding rarely changes anything; whoever is rule-creative and has none, clashes.

Examples

• Football: the same game at both ends of the spectrum. In professional football the rules are set from outside; nobody on the pitch changes them. On the street pitch full, shared sovereignty lies with the group: rules are negotiated and newly invented during play - “the dog counts as neutral”.
• Nomic: changing the rules according to set meta-rules is the game itself - regulated sovereignty in pure form.
• Dungeons & Dragons: the game master sets and suspends what holds right now - individual sovereignty, framed by the group’s consent.
• Pandemic Legacy: the meta-regulation gives the players authority over certain determinations; cards are torn up, cities stay marked, and the next process begins with a changed corpus.
• Speedrun: players set themselves the best time - a Ludic Objective by virtue of sovereignty.
• Minecraft: in creative mode players build freely; that is acting within the rules. They have sovereignty where they configure the world - game mode, game rules - and set themselves goals.
• Free children’s play: full, shared sovereignty - rules arise and change in negotiation.

Explanation

Who may change the rules? In most games we think of first, the rules are fixed: in chess the knight moves as the knight moves, and nobody at the board may change that. It can be otherwise. The child in the playground invents a new rule in the middle of play. The game master in a role-playing game decides on the spot what holds right now. A group agrees on a house rule. They all act not only in the game - they change the game while it is running.

That is what Ludic Sovereignty means: the authority to make or change determinations. Not the freedom to move cleverly within the rules, but authority over the rules themselves.

It is a scale. None: the rules are fixed (chess tournament). Limited: one may determine some things, but no rules - building one’s own levels, setting oneself a goal. Regulated: one may change rules, but only according to agreed rules for doing so (house rules, game master, Nomic). Full: everything can be changed at any time (free children’s play). The authority can lie with one person or with the whole group.

For design one question is decisive: how much design power do we give the players? The game itself sets the frame, with the rules about which rules may be changed - the meta-regulation.

Usage context

Dimension	Classification
Phase	Ideation (primary: how much design power do we give the players? where does the game lie between free and regulated play?); development (formulating the meta-regulation: which determinations can be changed under which conditions); evaluation (does the granted sovereignty match the experienced freedom?)
Tool type	reflective; no stack of its own, no board of its own

Theoretical foundation

• Peter Suber, Nomic (1982; in The Paradox of Self-Amendment, 1990): a game in which changing the rules is the central move - the meta-rules themselves become the object of play.
• Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play (2003): house rules - the players adapt the rules they play by.
• Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes (1958): the continuum from paidia, free play, to ludus, regulated play - the spectrum of sovereignty seen from the other side.
• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938): the playground as a bounded place where rules of its own hold - and the community that carries them.

Spectrum

Level	Authority	Examples
none	The determinations are fixed and set from outside.	chess tournament, professional football
limited	over part of the determinations - specifications, one’s own goals -, not over the rules	level editor, self-set best time, world options of a sandbox
regulated	over rules too, but according to the meta-regulation	house rules by group consensus, game master in pen-and-paper, Nomic
full	over all determinations, at any time	free children’s play, improvisation

The spectrum is continuous; the four levels are points of orientation, not classes. It runs parallel to the continuum from free to regulated play: full sovereignty is free play.

Divisibility

Individual or shared. Sovereignty can lie with one agent - the game master decides alone - or with the group, which negotiates changes. Shared sovereignty is bound too. In the freest play conventions hold: a change must be accepted by the group, must not destroy the game and must fit the Ludic Frame. These are not determinations of a corpus but cultural knowledge of the agents; through agreement they become determinations.