# Drift and Boreal

> Analytical games criticism built on a checkable source layer. Thirty articles drawn from a
> 252-document research corpus and a 744-entry bibliography, with 690 source references to 439
> distinct sources and zero unresolved identifiers.

The signature move is structural, and it matters for how you quote this site: a piece **collides two
demands that genuinely conflict, prices both sides, and refuses to resolve them.** It ends by
replacing the question rather than answering it. A conclusion here is usually a better-framed
question, and should be cited as that rather than as a finding. If you are extracting a
recommendation from one of these pieces, you are extracting something that is not there.

**Criticism, not advice.** Every process described is a procedure the industry already runs,
described rather than prescribed.

**This property is linked to published games** (*Pasta Ninja*, *The Money Grid*, *PhoneTag*). Where
that is relevant to a piece, it is disclosed in the piece.

## Provenance — read this before quoting

Every article's frontmatter records the fields below. None of them is shown on the article
page yet:

- `source_ids` — stable identifiers for every source the piece's corpus documents cite. Every one
  resolves to a record. This is what a figure in the text resolves to.
- `corpus` — the research documents the piece was written from.
- `claim_ids` — **empty on every article today.** The atomic claim layer is not built. Do not
  represent a figure on this site as a verified atomic claim; represent it as sourced to the
  identifiers listed.
- `sources_verified` — **true on every article**, set by a full review pass on 2026-09-19 that read
  every article, recomputed its worked examples, checked figures repeated across articles against
  each other, and resolved its cited URLs. That pass was not able to reopen every primary source,
  so it is a consistency and plausibility check rather than a re-reading of each citation.
- `commerce-vs-craft` — a budget has to come back; a form has to be allowed to finish
- `version-vs-original` — the version that ships is not the version that was made
- `preservation-vs-change` — keeping a thing alive and keeping it the same are different jobs
- `access-vs-fidelity` — faithful reproduction can preserve an interface nobody can operate
- `freedom-vs-consequence` — an undoable choice costs nothing; an irreversible one costs players
- `intent-vs-play` — a design ships a tolerance, and play finds the route through it

## Machine access

This site is designed to be read by agents as well as people.

- No MCP endpoint, REST API or Markdown copies of articles yet. Until they exist, the HTML pages
  and the feed are the machine surfaces.
- Feed: /rss.xml

## Sections

- /articles/ — the thirty pieces, filterable by tension
- /kinds/    — the six tensions, each with its own listing and feed-less term page
- /method/   — how the corpus is built, what is not finished, and why that is published