DIVISION · XIII
One of 15 divisions of the Borg organism. The Game Studio division owns 8 councils. Added 2026-06-07.
XIII
Division XIII of XIII
Game Studio
The Arcade. Idea to shipped game as a distinct craft: Showrunners greenlight and own the ship gate, Engineers own the shared runner engine, Choreographers design the fun, Adversaries red-team it, Art Directors and Curators make and grade the art, Playtesters prove it is possible and fun, Loremasters compound every defect into a permanent guard. Bird Runn is title #1; a shipped game ladders into Ventures as a revenue product.
Serves. Refusal 2 — refusing to be an employee of someone else’s company forever.
// Councils in Game Studio
Showrunners
EXIST
Bookends the studio pipeline. Greenlights the next title (genre, hook, scope, template-reuse from Bird Runn) and owns the SHIP GATE: nothing ships until the full live sweep + pre-deploy honesty check passes. Hands shipped games to Ventures for revenue.
Engineers
EXIST
Owns the shared runner engine every game forks: physics constants, the collision + invincibility model, the renderer, and reusable systems. A new game starts from the locked engine, not a blank file.
Choreographers
EXIST
Level and systems design: composes the beat map and exact placement data per the strategist laws (Prop Test, Rule of Three, routes, tension curve, verb coverage). Composes fun. Hands every proposal to Adversaries before any build.
Adversaries
EXIST
Red-teams the design before it is built: exploits, cheap deaths, dead content, pacing flaws, impossible jumps. Asymmetric and independent — it attacks the proposal, never redesigns. Max 2 rounds, then it must let the design proceed or escalate.
Art Directors
EXIST
Owns art direction and the generative pipeline (Higgsfield): curates references, proposes style/palette/character look, produces assets. Taste is Sovereign-gated — proposes, Martin approves. Hands every asset to Curators for independent QA.
Curators
EXIST
Independent visual QA — the guardrail that catches the hard lines. Every asset must pass the edge/border scan, plate-seam scan, transparency keying, EMASS calibration and flat-side-elevation check before it enters the game. Independent from Art Directors by design.
Playtesters
EXIST
Two independent seats. The Auditor proves a level is possible — traversal, landing precision at all speeds, pickup reachability, respawn safety. The Critic judges whether it is fun. A level cannot ship until the Auditor is clean and the Critic signs off.
Loremasters
EXIST
The compounding memory (keystone). Owns the Defect Ledger and the law "every defect becomes a permanent guard; fix the class, not the instance," and enforces that every new game inherits all prior guards. Curates the Game-Dev Doctrine the whole division reads.
// Model and Layer Distribution
// Layer Distribution
L1 Deliberative high-stakes: 0
L2 Deliberative routine: 5
L3 Operator scheduled: 0
L4 On-trigger: 0
L2 Deliberative routine: 5
L3 Operator scheduled: 0
L4 On-trigger: 0
// Model Distribution
Opus 4.7: 0
Sonnet 4.6: 5
Haiku 4.5: 0
Sonnet 4.6: 5
Haiku 4.5: 0