clay-borg/simulators/machinations.md

# Machinations

`unverified` throughout — background knowledge, not checked this session

## What it optimises for

**Game economies and feedback loops**, expressed diagrammatically:
resources, pools, converters, and the flows between them, simulated
immediately as you edit.

## How a game is defined

A diagram of resource flows — **not** a rules-complete description. You
model the economy, not the game.

## What it can analyse

Emergent economic behaviour: runaway loops, starvation, equilibrium of
resource flows. Fast iteration is the selling point.

## What it does not do

Model a *played* game: no turn structure, hidden information, or
simultaneous decisions in the sense GROUND needs. It is a model of a
subsystem.

## Relevance to clay-borg

**Limited, and worth stating so.** GROUND's interesting structure is
social state and commit/reveal, not resource economy. The one place it
touches us is the Stress ledger, which *is* a flow — and the H1 finding
that "ATTACK is the sole inbound pressure" is exactly the observation a
flow diagram makes obvious at a glance.

**That is a real lesson**: it took us a policy panel and three review
rounds to notice a property of the Stress economy that a flow model would
have shown immediately.

## What to steal

The habit of asking, for any resource: **what puts it in, what takes it
out, and is either path reachable?**

## Open questions

- Everything factual above. This profile is a placeholder with a lesson
  attached, not an evaluation.

## Sources

None fetched. **Marked `unverified` in full** rather than dressed up.