🎴 Card

"Portable tokens of capability, identity, and access."

MOOLLM K-Lines

K-Line	Why Related
skill/	Cards ARE skills
prototype/	Cards clone from prototypes
room/	Cards activate in rooms
character/	Characters can be cards
party/	Cards as companions
soul-chat/	Cards can speak
adventure/	Cards as quest companions
multi-presence/	Same card, many rooms
advertisement/	Cards advertise abilities
return-stack/	Activation records as continuations
visualizer/	Pure state prompt clusters
hero-story/	Hero cards invoke traditions

Full Spec: SKILL.md

Overview

Cards are portable capability tokens you can carry, play, and activate. They're templates — put them in play in a room to create live instances.

Origin: HyperCard + Magic: The Gathering + Fluxx + K-lines + Hewitt Actors.

The Card Lineage

Cards are natural. The metaphor appears independently across computing history:

HyperCard (1987)

Bill Atkinson's revolution. Cards and stacks. Navigation by linking. Scripting with HyperTalk.

• Inspired the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee cited it)
• Created the wiki concept
• Launched Myst and countless experiences
• Put programming in hands of artists and designers
• Deeply embedded in LLM training data

HyperCard cards have a front (visible interface) and back (hidden script). MOOLLM cards mirror this: CARD.yml is the sniffable interface, SKILL.md is the deeper content.

HyperTalk event handlers ARE our lifecycle hooks:

HyperCard	MOOLLM	When
on openCard	ON-DRAW	Card enters view
on closeCard	ON-DISCARD	Card leaves
on mouseUp	ON-PLAY	Card activated
on mouseEnter	ON-ENTER-HAND	Card arrives
on mouseLeave	ON-LEAVE-HAND	Card departs

Same pattern. Same idea. Bill Atkinson figured this out in 1987.

Magic: The Gathering (1993)

Richard Garfield's collectible card game introduced:

• Cards as portable, tradeable capabilities
• Activation costs and timing
• Stack-based resolution (the "stack")
• Cards that modify other cards

Fluxx (1996)

Looney Labs' meta-card game where cards change the rules:

• No fixed rules — rules are cards
• Goals change mid-game
• Perfect chaos testing for simulations
• See experiment/fluxx-chaos/

Why Cards Work

Property	Benefit
Discrete	Clear boundaries, easy to reason about
Portable	Can be carried, traded, given
Composable	Stack, combine, interact
Two-sided	Interface vs implementation
Collectible	Build decks, create ensembles

The same pattern, different eras, all deeply understood by models trained on human knowledge.

Quick Example

card:
  name: "Git Goblin"
  type: familiar
  emoji: "🧌"
  
  ability:
    name: "Bisect"
    effect: "Binary search for bug introduction"
    
  advertisements:
    - action: BISECT
      score: 90

Card Types

Type	Examples
person	Dave Ungar, Seymour Papert (Hero-Story)
familiar	Git Goblin 🧌, Index Owl 🦉
tool	fs.read, search.vector
concept	POSTEL, YAML-JAZZ

Activation Records

Playing a card = creating an activation record. Like Self, cards have multiple methods:

# design-room/architect-task-001.activation
card: architect.card
method: generate_proposal
state:
  iteration: 3
  status: awaiting_vote

Cards can also be pure state (prompt clusters, context bundles) that other cards reference.

Commands

Command	Effect
PLAY [card]	Activate in room
PLAY [card].[method]	Activate specific method
COLLECT [card]	Add to collection
DECK [name]	Build/select deck

Templates

File	Purpose
CARD.yml.tmpl	Individual card
COLLECTION.yml.tmpl	Card collection

Tools Required

• file_read — Read card definitions
• file_write — Create cards and collections

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See SKILL.md for complete specification.