Two flags, and only one of them is a decision

Most playing/running components expose both, and they are not two names for one thing:

• observed (isPlaying, isActive, isRunning) — output is actually happening right now.
• intent (playWhenReady, shouldRun, startRequested) — someone asked for it to happen.

Between the two sits a third state nobody names: committed, not yet producing. Buffering, resolving a stream, opening a device. Observed is false there, and it is false for a user pause too — so a comparison against observed cannot tell "the network stuttered" from "the user pressed pause". In a shared session that difference is the whole feature: publish the first as if it were the second and one member's hiccup stops everybody.