Make decisions shared, visible, and durable
GDC-L1-TEAM-000401
Statement
A team can only align on decisions it can see and remember. Record settled decisions where everyone can find them, and make the reasoning visible — shared understanding, not private knowledge, is what keeps a distributed effort coherent. Undocumented decisions are lost decisions.
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Rationale
Coherence (VISION-0001) is a property of shared understanding, and understanding that lives only
in one person's head or in a hallway conversation doesn't scale past that moment
[S-schell-artofgamedesign]. Decisions get re-litigated, contradicted, or silently forgotten;
new members and future-you can't reconstruct why something is the way it is; and the same
debates recur. Making decisions visible and durable — written down, findable, with their
reasoning — turns the team's accumulated choices into a shared, persistent memory that keeps
everyone building the same game. It also enables honest disagreement to resolve rather than
recur, because a settled decision is recorded rather than perpetually reopened. (This
constitution — and its STATUS.md session tracker — is itself an instance of the principle.)
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Applies when
Any team with more than a couple of people, any project spanning enough time that people forget, and especially distributed, async, or long-lived efforts. The larger and longer, the more it matters.
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Does not apply / Exceptions
Over-documentation is a real cost — a team can drown in process and write docs no one reads, which is its own failure. The bar is decisions and their reasoning, not every detail; capture what future-you and new members genuinely need. Very small, co-located teams can hold much in shared conversation, though even they drift without some durable record.
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Implementation
Record settled decisions and why somewhere findable (a design doc, a decision log, a tracker). Make the reasoning visible, not just the conclusion. Keep it lightweight enough that it's actually maintained. Revisit and update as decisions change — a stale record misleads.
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Disagreement
Documentation-heavy (durable, scalable, but risks process bloat and unread docs) vs. lightweight/ conversational (fast, low-overhead, but forgetful and hard to scale). The balance depends on team size, distribution, and project length — more of both as those grow.
07
Notes
Confidence 4.
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Connected principles
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Source trail
S-schell-artofgamedesignJesse Schell. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008.
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