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The maintainer could not tell whether "error", "failure", "finding" or "correction" referred to the game's design, our formalisation of it, the code, the measuring apparatus, or the sentences we wrote. Three review rounds produced twenty-odd defect statements spanning five systems, all called errors. The confusion was ours. specs/Taxonomy.md, grounded in named canon rather than invented here: six strata from Sargent's problem entity / conceptual model / computerized model, extended where a simulation-V&V frame stops — we also own an instrument and an account. The two relations are what was missing: GAME<->MODEL is validation, MODEL<->ENGINE is verification, and nearly every argument about "our bug or their gap" was that distinction going unnamed. Fault/error/failure from Avizienis et al., applied within a stratum, plus the rule that explains the review history: a failure in one stratum is a fault in the next. And it finally defines the family ADR-0018 could only point at — a wrong-subject error is an ACCOUNT failure with no INSTRUMENT fault, which is why tests never catch them. MDA supplies the game-facing layers and one hard limit: our panels measure dynamics, our trial logs sample aesthetics, and a win rate does not answer "is it fun". specs/Positioning.md names the field fairly — Ludii is the closest relative and the right benchmark — and the four differentiators, each already built rather than aspired to. Clay-borg is a design-evidence instrument; anyone can produce the number. Three tracks named and none started: a second game, game theory as the lens on dynamics, and assimilated knowledge about why games work. Track A is the falsifier for the whole positioning: every abstraction here has exactly one instance, which by our own rule may mean invented rather than observed. Chaos window 3 closes at 12 declarations with one override that changed nothing. Its verdict is due and is deliberately not written here. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Positioning — what clay-borg is for, and what it does that others do not
Status: draft. A working answer to "where does this sit, and what is the point of it", written against the field rather than in isolation.
Companion to ../INTENT.md (what we are building),
Taxonomy.md (the vocabulary), and
Ornamentation.md (the boundary).
1. The field, honestly
There are mature systems here and we are not first.
| system | what it optimises for | what it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Ludii (Digital Ludeme Project) | generality of representation. Games as ludemes — composable, human-readable concepts. Fast, broad, a game fits in a QR code | it is not built to argue with the designer about the rules, and its evidence is not auditable by a third party |
| GDL / General Game Playing (Stanford) | agent generality — an agent that plays a game it has never seen | verbose, slow relative to Ludii, and aimed at AI research rather than design support |
| Machinations | economy and feedback-loop simulation, diagrammatic and immediate | not rules-complete; a model of flows, not of a played game |
| Tabletop Simulator / boardgame.io | play, human or networked | no analysis; the rules are a script, not a claim |
| RL self-play stacks | strength | a strong agent tells you what beats what, not why a rule is undecided |
Ludii is the closest relative and the right benchmark. If clay-borg's answer to "why not Ludii" is only "ours is in Rust", there is no answer.
2. What we do differently
Four things, and each is already visible in the repo rather than aspired to.
2.1 The measurement is under suspicion by construction
Every other system in §1 treats its own output as data. This one treats
its own output as a claim that has to survive an attempt to break it —
GameDesign.md §1 admissibility, the finding register, mutation-proof as
a condition for a control, and mandatory adversarial review at tier L.
This is not a posture; it is measured. Three review rounds on one measurement found twelve fatal defects, every one in our instrument and none in the game — including two that inverted a verdict already written down. A tool that reports game-design conclusions without that machinery is reporting its own bugs at the same volume as its results.
2.2 Authority is federated, and the simulator is not the authority
The game's owner rules; we report. A rule we cannot execute becomes a finding carried back with the artifact that produced it — never a default we quietly pick.
Ludii's model is a description someone wrote. Ours is a claim about somebody else's artifact, with digests and tripwires against their source of truth, and a queue of open questions that belong to them. That is a different relationship to the designer than any system above has.
2.3 What is not mechanism is modelled too
Ornamentation.md. Materials, ceremony, typography,
timing — declared, with falsifiers, and separated from the rules by a test
something can run (does the state hash move?).
Every system in §1 either ignores this or treats it as presentation config. We treat "this does not matter" as a claim that can be wrong, because our own register is a list of times it was.
2.4 A hypothesis is a package, not a patch
A design experiment arrives as a selectable variant — a catalog entry,
a machine-readable rules_delta, declared success criteria — and is
measured against those criteria, with the results reported including the
parts that fail. The variant is in the game state, so a recording says
which rules it was played under.
3. What that adds up to
Clay-borg is a design-evidence instrument, not a game engine and not a game-playing AI. Its product is an auditable answer to "what does this rule actually do at the table, and how much should you trust that?"
The second half of that sentence is the differentiator. Anyone can produce the number.
4. Where it has to go
Three tracks, in dependency order. None started.
Track A — a second game
GROUND is an example, and nothing has tested that claim. Every abstraction here has exactly one instance, which by our own rule (GameDesign §2) means it may have been invented rather than observed.
The work is to take a popular, well-understood game — one where the dynamics are already documented, so our output can be checked against something — and build a clay-borg definition efficiently enough that the cost is itself the finding. The measurement that matters is how much of the kernel turns out to be GROUND-shaped.
Ludii's ludeme decomposition is the obvious prior art to steal from, and the honest question is whether we need our own description language at all or should consume theirs.
Track B — game theory as the lens on dynamics
§4 of Taxonomy.md: our panels measure dynamics, and
game theory is the science of exactly that. Today we sample the strategy
space with two hand-written policies and a rank parameter. That is a crude
instrument for questions that have real theory behind them:
- dominance — is an action dominated? (F17 asks this about ATTACK and answers it with a sweep)
- equilibrium — what does competent play converge to, and is it the play the designer intended?
- cooperative solution concepts — GROUND is co-operative with a defection mechanic; the core and the Shapley value are the standard tools for "is this coalition stable" and "what is a seat contributing", which is precisely what GR-E04 is groping at
- social dilemmas — DARVO is one; the literature on them is large
The proposed shape is a specialised agent, not a library: something that reads a clay-borg game definition and a panel run, and reports what the theory says about the dynamics — with the same admissibility rules as everything else, because a Nash equilibrium quoted without its assumptions is exactly the wrong-subject error in mathematical dress.
Track C — assimilated knowledge about why games work
The furthest out, and the one the maintainer named as the point: make what is known about game dynamics available to designers.
MDA's aesthetics vocabulary, the balance literature, documented failure modes (runaway leader, kingmaking, analysis paralysis, dominant strategy, degenerate equilibrium). The value is not a database — it is that a finding from a panel run can be named as an instance of a known pattern, and the designer told what usually follows.
The risk is obvious and worth stating now: this track is where a tool starts telling designers what is fun, on the strength of numbers that measure dynamics. §4 of the taxonomy is the guard, and it will be under pressure here.
5. Falsifier
Track A is the falsifier for this whole document. If a second game cannot be defined without reshaping the kernel around it, then "GROUND is an example" was never true, clay-borg is a GROUND engine with ambitions, and §2's differentiators are properties of one bespoke tool rather than of a framework.