The Game Engine

The calculating part: the same rule, applied by anyone to the same record, deck and clock, returns the same answer.

A game needs an engine or its board is an opinion. The engine is what turns a body's cards, its record and its shared clock into answers everyone can check: start and finish dates, Float on every item, the Critical Path, the stage each piece of work has reached, and what a contribution banks. Two people in different countries with the same inputs get the same result, which is what lets them trust a number neither of them computed.

It is held in three layers, and the order matters. First a specification in plain words with a worked example, so that a person with paper and an afternoon gets the same answer as any machine. Then The conformance deck — a small set of cards with known answers that any implementation must reproduce. Then implementations, in whatever anyone happens to run. The specification is the rule; the programs are conveniences, and any of them may be thrown away (Screens and paper, Technology Sovereignty).

Its discipline is that the engine computes and never decides. It can say what the arithmetic of a plan implies; it cannot say what a body should do about it. How people's time, energy and attention are actually deployed against what the plan requires is a judgment of strategy, informed by the calculation and never set by it (Resource Leveling, Load, Wisdom).

It is load-bearing because it is the alternative to authority as a tie-breaker. Where a number is contested, a body without an engine resolves it by whoever is most senior or most insistent. With one, it resolves it by re-running the rule — and if the rule is wrong, by improving the rule in the open, once, for everyone (Proposal, Current Best Understanding).

Also called: the engine Stands on: Work Deck · Data Date · The Clock of the Game · The Record Opens onto: The conformance deck · Float · Critical Path · Resource Leveling · Kept as a share of made · LUV · Work Card · Kit of Parts · Everything Is Current Best Understanding In play: Home — run at the Turn, checkable by hand Sources: Projects/the term pages/The Game Engine.md (draft, unreviewed) · Projects/the term pages/Work Deck.md, Data Date.md, Resource Leveling.md (drafts) · lionsberg.wiki: Float Open: The engine's own page names the specification, the conformance deck and the reference implementations as its three layers, and only fragments of the first exist. · Its value calculation depends on a ledger the canon's own pages warn against (TimeEnergy).