A shared way to preserve how an emotion formed, what state is present now, and how it changes over time so different systems can understand the same affective description.
First-time readers can start with the 30-second explanation, story link, and visual tools; the specification index and developer resources below can be skipped at first.
In 30 Seconds
Emotion Is Not One Label
IAGA goes beyond naming an emotion by separating its background, present state, and path of change.
“Fear” is not only one word. The same fear may come from loss, threat, humiliation, or uncertainty, and it may coexist with anger, grief, anticipation, or longing. IAGA preserves the background that produced an emotion separately from the affective state that resulted, so systems can compare how the experience changes instead of reducing it to one label or a simple positive / negative score.
System boundary: IAGA describes and preserves the affective target. If a system tries to reconstruct that feeling in a particular person or substrate, Elysium must separately check personal differences, current state, permissions, and safety.
Public version status: IAGA's public data interface is currently 1.0 RC / Public RC Projection. CL1–CL5 have public conformance rules; CL6 Production Conformance remains undefined and locked.
Story link: IAGA is not tied to one story chapter here. For a story-based way to understand mixed affect, read Causal Stack Overflow and the Dirty Golden Age. This is a reading example, not a claim that the chapter directly uses the name IAGA.
How to Read IAGA
What Do 14D, the 12D Core, and the Emotion Compass Each Do?
Understand one time point first, then move backward to T1 and forward to T3 to see temporal change.
Acceptance confirmed · T2
One event can contain several emotions at once
In this teaching example, the 14D generation/context layer preserves how the event formed, while the 12D Core describes the resulting affective structure. The Emotion Compass then displays T2 with reader-facing values such as Joy 94, Relief 89, Excitement 81, and Surprise 68 for quick scanning.
Do not reverse the interpretation: 94 is not a formal measurement of joy and cannot predict that another person will have the same experience. These numbers belong only to the teaching compass below.
Reader Tools
Quickly Read Mixed Affect and Semantic Structure
The following visual tools support human interpretation; they are not formal engineering units of the IAGA 12D Core.
This overview gives readers concrete names for the underlying dimensions; endpoint definitions, qualitative representation, and numeric governance remain in the deeper specification.
Values are a reader-facing illustrative profile showing how IAGA represents mixed affect; they are neither fixed psychological scores nor a universal engineering scale for the IAGA 12D Core. T1, T2, and T3 here are timeline markers and do not correspond to T = Taste in S-Code / ISO-Taste.
APositive Activation
BSocial Connection
CExploration & Attention
DThreat & Uncertainty
ELoss & Withdrawal
FRejection & Conflict
GDesire & Regulation
Joy94
Relief89
Excitement81
Surprise68
Pride64
Gratitude59
Anticipation56
Anxiety28
Personal Calibration
Same target, different input
This is an Elysium personal-calibration teaching example: measure the experiencer's response bias before reconstruction, then compensate the delivered intensity.
This is a reader teaching example of Elysium using an IAGA target, not a formal unit of the IAGA twelve-axis Core. Elysium measures the result again for closed-loop correction; IAGA preserves the target, calibration references, and residuals.
T3About ten minutes laterJoy 81 · Relief 75 · Pride 67 · Gratitude 65 · Anticipation 62 · Anxiety 34
IAGA preserves recorded affective structure, personal-calibration references, and unresolved residuals for comparison and use by other systems. Elysium performs reconstruction within applicable calibration, permission, and technical constraints; the result does not establish identical first-person experience.
Emotion names are semantic anchors for navigating affective space, not the twelve underlying IAGA primary axes. The seven regions are a reading aid: states can blend, cross regions, and move over time.
Unstarred labels come from the 27-category research-informed reference vocabulary; * marks Aistory reader-facing practical extensions. Both are semantic profiles rather than additional underlying axes.
The topics below are the deeper specification. You can skip them for a worldbuilding overview and open a topic only when you need definitions, data structure, or governance details.