Sighting

What a player saw that the whole should know.

A sighting is not a complaint and not a proposal. It is an observation put where it can be acted on: something noticed in the work, in the world, or in the way the Game is being played, said plainly by the one who saw it. A defect found in a card is a sighting. So is a constraint nobody has named, an opportunity in a place, or a pattern seen twice.

It is load-bearing because a body with no channel for what its members notice is blind in exactly the places it most needs eyes. The Pattern's own standard is that every defect is a gift, and a gift has to be handed to someone. A sighting is the handing: it turns private noticing into something the whole can use, without requiring the one who saw it to also know what to do about it.

It also protects the one who saw. A sighting names what was seen rather than who is at fault, which keeps the channel open: a body where noticing costs someone stops being told things, and stops being able to see itself at all.

A Player+ writes a sighting short and factual — what was seen, where, when, by whom — and sends it where it can be received: to the Cell, to the home, or up the season's page as the thing it names deserves. A sighting that names a better way becomes a proposal; a sighting that names something that hurts is pain, and calls for a response rather than a record.

An agent may help shape a sighting and may carry it where its person says, and it is the person's own to send.

Also called: — Stands on: Every Defect Is A Gift · The Record · Sensemaking Opens onto: Pain (as signal) · Proposal · Issue · The Season Sheet · Bard · Improvement log In play: table · Home Sources: The DNA of Heaven, Part XII (the words handed in the Game) · lionsberg.wiki: Every Defect Is A Gift, Identifying And Solving Issues (unmarked). Open: no canon page yet holds the word; it is named in the seed's word list and not yet articulated, and the boundary between a sighting, an issue and a proposal is not drawn anywhere.