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July 16, 2025

On creating text adventures and predicting the past with the future

We look at what it takes to create a well-polished text adventure (and get a chance to play mine!) and we get brief but possibly useful advice from Bueno de Mesquita.

Hello! I hope your week is going well.

New articles

Lessons From Creating My First Text Adventure

The text adventure is an alluring form of game, because it ostensibly requires so little to create. Yet making a good one is very difficult, because it amounts to molding a world with believable interactions between many objects and actors. Here's my first text adventure, Lockout, as well as what I learned along the way of making it.

Full article (10–30 minute read): Lessons From Creating My First Text Adventure

Flashcard of the week

In forecasting, we often look to the past for guidance as to how the future will evolve. We often look at what happened, but maybe it would be useful to also look at what did not happen.

Why are the consequences of the things that didn't happen meaningful?

This is from The Predictioneering Game by Bueno de Mesquita. He focuses on processes that are relatively strongly influenced by active actors, and he answers thusly:

Their anticipation probably played a cause in what did happen.

There's something delightful about the idea that what happened is caused partially by the consequences of what did not happen. It seems to violate two rules of physics at once: both that the future cannot affect the present, and that what does not come to pass cannot have any effect at all!

There is, of course, no violation of physics at all. It comes down to active actors simulating the world in their heads and that makes everything more complicated.

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