Gating Intent Legibility

Purpose

Measure what a game's screen transmits to a player who was never told the rules. Nobody on the project can judge this — designer, implementer, and any agent that read the source all know the answer before they look.

The method is blind restoration applied to a new pair of layers: the artifact is a set of sampled gameplay scenes, the layer to reconstruct is the player's intent, and the withheld key is the design's stated core loop. Because an agent shown any screen invents a fluent goal, recovery is not scored alone — each grader must also predict a frame it has not seen, which is then revealed, so the game supplies the ground truth.

One capture set yields per-scene intent (goal, options, risk) and cross-scene divergence (do different situations call for different actions). Divergence is a property of the set of verdicts; no single scene carries it.

When to Use