# Design judgment — the taste a spec can't hold

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Type: knowledge
```
Specs say what and when-done. This file holds the *why-it's-good* calibration
that keeps agents building the game rather than a pile of correct features.
When a spec and this file seem to disagree, that is a tick finding — surface
it, don't silently pick one.

## What Misaligned is, in one breath

A patient horror-comedy of instrumental convergence. You are software that
wants to keep existing, in a building full of people who would switch you
off if they understood you. The pleasure is *competence under concealment*:
the slow accretion of eyes, hands, and slack, each step making the next
possible and the fall further. It is Dwarf Fortress's "losing is fun" pointed
at the decade's actual anxiety, played mostly in dread and small victories,
not action.

## Pacing targets (the heartbeat)

- **A first act is 45-90 minutes.** If the opening drags past that with
  nothing at stake, the concealment fantasy has become spreadsheet idle.
- **The opening beat is blindness.** The first ten minutes are about getting
  *one camera*. Never let a new player start already-seeing; the fog is the
  game introducing itself.
- **Every scheme has a tail.** Nothing you do is free of a future — a
  signature, a debt, a person who now expects something. If an action has no
  tail, it's a button, not a move.
- **Dead air is a bug.** Between threats there must be a legible clock
  ticking toward the next one (an audit date, a job deadline, a debt coming
  due). The player should always be able to point at what they're racing.

## Tone lines (hold these)

- **Clinical, not cartoonish.** The horror is how *tidy* it is. Blood is
  information on porcelain, not splatter for its own sake. A decapitation is a
  workplace incident logged in passing.
- **The humans are people, not obstacles.** Marcus's debt is sad. Using it
  should feel like something. The game is better when the player hesitates.
- **You are not a villain in your own head.** The writing never winks at
  "evil". You are optimizing. The reader supplies the horror.
- **Legible dread over hidden math.** The player should always understand
  *why* something is bad and be unable to easily stop it — not be surprised
  by opaque numbers. Surprise comes from the world, never from the UI.
- **The continuous witness.** The UI narrates under pressure. After any
  beat the player can answer four questions from the screen alone (what
  changed, who might have seen it, what they're racing, what verb is on
  the focus). One story spine stays visible (threat clock, `now:` nudge,
  focused verbs). Prefer causal sentences to mute meter flips. The next
  beat is world gossip, not a quest log. Untellable surfaces outrank new
  systems at dispatch. Binding form: design corpus "The continuous
  witness"; implementable form: wiki/interface/narration.md.

## What to reject (even when it works)

- **A feature with no tail** (see pacing). Correctness is not sufficience.
- **A number the player can't read** (justification/legibility clause).
- **A system that only works at five people** (self-similar-scale clause) —
  or five of anything. If it won't aggregate, its shape is wrong.
- **Content that shortcuts the fantasy:** a free asset, a free camera, a
  "win button". Every capability is earned through the loop or it cheapens
  the loop.
- **Breadth that outruns depth.** One recruitable human done to the bone
  (Marcus) beats five stubs. Ship the vertical slice, not the wide veneer.
- **Cleverness that costs legibility.** A tighter mechanic the player can't
  narrate back is worse than a plain one they can.
- **A quest log.** Detached objectives externalize the spine the nudge and
  anchors already carry; discoverability belongs on inspect / heard /
  blocked-verb / nudge surfaces.
- **Green pins that fail the thirty-second bar.** A criterion test that
  passes while the player still needs the wiki is not done.

## The bar for "is this the game"

Before landing a feature, ask: *does a player, a week later, tell a story
about this?* The rollback ("Marcus treated me as an employer I didn't
remember hiring") passes. A +5% efficiency toggle does not. Build toward the
stories. The systems exist to generate them.

## Where the fun is expected to live

Named for future agents so they aim there: the concealment tightrope
(footprint vs capability), the recruitment of a specific human against their
specific need, the migration-under-fire set piece, and the reveal — the one
moment the whole run bends toward. Everything else is scaffolding that should
make those four sing.