The Game Interface
The whole surface a Player acts on — a screen today, a room tomorrow — every part of it named, so that anyone can say exactly where.
A Player does not meet the Game as an idea. They meet it as a surface: a column of headings, a panel of rows, a number with a caption under it, a box to write in. That surface is the Game Interface. It is not the Game — the Game is played at a table with paper and voices, and it runs complete with no screen at all — but wherever a surface exists, it is what most people will touch first and most often.
Its governing law is that everything is acted on where it is. A row is answered on the row; a defect is handed in from the panel where it was met; nothing asks a person to go somewhere else and re-describe what they are already looking at. The cost of breaking this law is not inconvenience but silence: a person who must leave what they are doing in order to report what they saw usually does not report it.
Its second law is that its parts have names. A Sighting is only useful if it says where, and where requires a shared word a hand can point at. So the interface carries a short, plain vocabulary — The names of the interface's parts — which is taught on the surface itself rather than in a manual, and which a grandmother can use on her first afternoon (The grandmother test).
Every surface of the Game is a sort of one underlying set of cards and one underlying record (Work Deck, The Record). The interface shows; it does not hold. If a screen and the paper disagree, the paper is the record.
Also called: the surface · the screen of the Game Stands on: Interface · Screens and paper · The Record · The Deck Standard Opens onto: The names of the interface's parts · The HUD · Sighting · The eight kinds of Sighting · Room · The Big Room · Notebook form In play: table · Home — wherever a Player reads the Game without asking anyone Sources: The Game Interface — The Names of Its Parts (Projects, term page 2026-09-12; draft, awaiting proofread) · The Bug Report — Every Defect Is a Gift, as a Sighting (Projects, process v0, 2026-09-12; draft) · The HUD (the term pages; draft) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII (Fable synthesis) Open: The Room — the fuller, shared surface the interface is said to become — is named in the drafts and specified nowhere; only the screen exists today.