Explain this¶
Explain this
| Kind | The question you can ask of anything |
| Answers | a chain of causes, in words |
| Reaches back | 6 links by default, up to 20 |
| Ends at | you, the world's beginning, or the limit |
| Since | Phase 1 |
| Status | designed · Phase 1 |
| Technical | Causal trace |
Every sentence in the feed and every card has an Explain this. Ask it, and the game walks back through what caused what and tells you in plain words:
Kira left the square because the inn was burning and she is cautious. The inn caught fire because the smithy's heat crossed 250 °. The smithy was set alight by you, on the morning of day 3.
This is the game's central promise. A village that does surprising things is only interesting if you can find out why; a surprise with no why is noise. So the engine keeps the thread of every decision and every change, and Explain this pulls on it.
What a chain is made of¶
Each link is one of a few kinds of thing, each with its own kind of sentence:
- A decision — Kira left because the inn was burning and she is cautious. What she chose, what it beat, and what she was looking at when she chose: her danger, her caution, her hunger.
- A change in the world — The inn caught fire because the smithy's heat crossed 250 °. The physical cause, with the numbers that mattered.
- A memory — Kira walked to the forest because she remembered the bushes there were full, this morning.
- Something you did — The smithy was set alight by you, on the morning of day 3. Chains that reach you stop there: you are a first cause.
- The beginning — …has been there since the village was founded.
On a person¶
Ask it on a villager's card and you get the present: what they are doing, the choice that won, and the two it beat — Tomas is fetching water (it beat fleeing to the square and eating) — and what each was based on.
Limits¶
A chain stops after six links by default; you can ask for more, up to twenty. Some links are shallow: a cause the engine did not record in detail reads as the heat rose rather than the heat rose because…. The design asks every part of the engine to record enough that a reader's next "why" has an answer; where it doesn't yet, the chain says so rather than inventing.
History¶
| Phase | Change |
|---|---|
| 1 | Introduced: Explain this on feed sentences and cards; chains through decisions, changes, memories and your actions; the "why" on every character card. |
See also¶
Watching · What villagers know · The timeline · Technical: Causal trace · From perception to Explain this