Should area/label carry semantic meaning (e.g. referenceable "zones"), or stay pure rendering decoration?

[OliEder]

Context

As part of the v2.0.0 program, we're removing color_scheme, color_role, and the color field from entities, area, and label — rendering concerns don't belong in a spec that's meant to describe only the meaning of a play, not how it's drawn. See the design doc for the full reasoning.

For entity.color, this is a clean removal: entity.type (offense/defense/...) already fully carries the role, and color was just an optional, purely-decorative override with no independent meaning.

For area and label, it's not that simple. Today, area is just {form, color, opacity, x, y, width, height, rotation, coords} — a free-floating drawn shape. Color is currently the only thing distinguishing what an area is for. Once color is removed, area becomes "draw a shape here" with zero indication of intent.

The question

Should area (and maybe label) become a genuinely referenceable game concept — something an action could point at, the way actions already reference entities (entity_ref), balls (ball_ref), and other actions (action_id)?

Concretely: could an instruction eventually read something like "pass the ball to a player within the target zone" — where "target zone" is a named area an action's to_player (or a new field) resolves against, not just a rectangle a renderer happens to draw?

If yes, this is a bigger addition than it sounds: it would need

• a role/kind field on area carrying real meaning (e.g. target_zone, restricted_zone) instead of a color,
• probably its own reference-integrity validation (something like today's REF_ENTITY_UNKNOWN, but for zones),
• and a design for how an action would actually target a region rather than an actor — the current possession/reference model has no equivalent for that.

If no — if area/label should stay pure decoration forever — then removing color without any replacement is fine as-is, and "meaning" for a region-based instruction would live entirely outside the spec (tooling convention, tags, or just not something OCF validates).

What we're NOT deciding here

This isn't a proposal, it's an open question. We removed color because keeping rendering decisions out of the spec is the right call regardless of how this resolves — but we want community input before committing area/label to either "stays decoration" or "becomes a first-class referenceable concept," since the second path is a real, non-trivial schema + validator addition.