Design axes

Resonance uses several axes to describe what a design does to the relationship between players, system, fiction, and world.

These axes are neither a hierarchy, nor a checklist, nor four properties that every Resonance game should possess. They are independent: a game may strongly emphasize one, leave another nearly neutral, or create productive tensions between them.

Their function is analytical: to help articulate what an experiment is trying to produce and what play actually reveals at the table.

Cognitive — where does player attention go?

The cognitive axis looks at where a game places the player's attention, judgment, and mental work.

One design may primarily ask players to manipulate an abstract model: values, combinations, procedures, optimization. Another may shift that work toward observing the situation, remembering the character, interpreting relationships, or noticing meanings already present in the fiction.

The point is therefore not to eliminate thought, but to ask:

What does the game ask the player to think about in order to play?

In Regard, resolution is structurally cognitive in this sense because its central gesture is to notice what matters in the situation rather than first searching for a value or rule to activate.

Diegetic — what continuity exists between fiction and manipulation?

The diegetic axis looks at continuity between what already has meaning in the fiction or intended experience and what players actually manipulate during play.

An injury, oath, relationship, object, color, gesture, or constraint can first exist as a meaningful part of the experience and then become mechanically operative without being reduced to an abstract modifier.

This continuity can concern rules, but also media, gestures, pacing, space, or information flow.

Does what the player manipulates extend something that already matters in the experience?

In Regard, Bets are fictional truths before they become mechanical elements. In Unmind, hidden fragments, depths, Traces, and the pill-token give material form to central properties of the experience: revelation, loss, silence, and treatment.

Perspectivist — who is looking at reality?

The perspectivist axis asks whether the way a situation is lived, understood, or inhabited can transform how the game functions.

A design may keep the same procedure for every character while describing different points of view. Another may make those points of view operative: changing resolution, information flow, fictional authority, or the form of the result according to the perspective involved.

Does the same situation function differently depending on the perspective from which it is lived?

Regard makes this possibility available notably through Prisms, without imposing it on every implementation. Scooby-Doo uses it to make its character tropes function differently. Unmind explores it differently: a statement can be true as a character's perception, memory, or certainty without automatically establishing an objective fact about the external world.

Ontological — what reality does the mechanic affirm?

The ontological axis asks what the game actually affirms about the nature of its world.

It becomes especially important when a difference in perspective does not merely represent several subjective interpretations of a supposedly neutral reality, but several ways for reality itself to exist or act.

Does the mechanic represent a way of seeing the world, or does it affirm that the world actually works that way within this relationship to reality?

Glorantha Perspectives strongly emphasizes this axis: different relationships to the world can become mechanically operative without being reduced to a single hidden physics underneath them.

Unmind shows the inverse distinction. The game gives structural importance to private perceptions and cosmologies, but explicitly chooses to leave their objective truth undecidable. It can therefore be strongly perspectivist without making the same ontological commitment.

Reading experiments through these axes

These examples are not definitive classifications. They show how the axes can help situate very different designs:

Experiment	Indicative reading
Regard	Cognitive and diegetic in its resolution gesture; perspectivism available; ontology left to the game built with it.
Glorantha Perspectives	Strongly emphasizes the cognitive, diegetic, perspectivist, and ontological axes so that several relationships to reality become playable.
Scooby-Doo	Uses perspectivism in particular to make tropes into different ways of producing and reading play, without requiring a strong ontological commitment.
Unmind	Strongly redirects attention and apparatus toward revelation, loss, and private truths; perspectivist in its distribution of fictional truth while deliberately suspending the ontological truth of some perceptions.

The point is not to search for the most "Resonance" profile.

The axes help us understand what a design chooses to make perceptible, operative, or real — and what it chooses instead to leave open.