Actor

Whoever is responsible for an act: the word that stands above "agent", covering both the living kind and the artificial one.

When a page needs to say "whoever did this and answers for it", the word is Actor. An agent is one kind; a living intelligence is the other. The distinction matters because almost every rule in the Game is about responsibility, and responsibility does not divide evenly between the two kinds: only a living Actor can give a word, hold a Quest, or be a Player.

It is load-bearing as a piece of hygiene in the language. Without it, "agent" gets stretched to cover people, and then a sentence about who may commit, who may consent, and who may be trusted becomes ambiguous exactly where it must not be. With it, a page can say plainly that any Actor may call stop, that any Actor may raise a defect, that any Actor may say we do not know — and separately that only a person may give a yes, widen a card, or make a promise.

A Player+ uses the word rarely and precisely: in the rules of a room, in a record of what happened, in a charter where a line must bind both kinds. Elsewhere the plainer words serve better — say "person" when you mean a person and "agent" when you mean an agent, and keep Actor for the sentence that must cover both.

The two kinds are named; the naming is not settled, and the field carries it as it stands rather than minting a firmer word in passing.

Also called: Living Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Stands on: Player · Agent · Accountability · Consciousness Opens onto: Principal · Authorized · Stop · Sign · Wise Right Speech In play: beyond Sources: The DNA of Heaven, Parts VII, VIII and X · Player+ Modules, Lexicon (the entry for agent) · lionsberg.wiki: Conscious Agent, Sovereign Agent (draft, term pages). Open: the names for the two kinds of Actor are held loosely; no canon page yet carries Actor in this sense.