Glossary

Claude Opus 5.5, 4 Nov. 2026

Contents

Argumentation

Canonical statement: a proposition reworded so that the terms it shares with another statement are literally the same. See Periodic Table of Arguments.
Character: in debate, a non-player character the player argues with.
Form, substance: two of the three properties that determine an argument’s type in the Periodic Table of Arguments. Form is what the premise and conclusion share; substance is what kinds of statement they are.
Gold map: a human-reviewed argument map, used as game content and as the standard that automated approaches are scored against.
Grounded extension: the arguments that survive a debate under the most cautious reading. See Abstract argumentation.
IAT: Inference Anchoring Theory, a way of mapping the arguments in a text or dialogue. See Inference Anchoring Theory and xAIF.
Lever: the usually unstated principle by which a premise supports a conclusion, such as cause, example or analogy.
Locution, proposition: what was said, and what was asserted by saying it.
PTA: the Periodic Table of Arguments, a classification of 50 argument types.
Thinking editor: the planned in-game tool in which players link statements into arguments. See Debate.
Tier: one of three increasingly costly ways of interpreting a player’s notes. See Reading notes.
xAIF: ARG-tech’s JSON format for IAT maps, which Quell’s maps extend.

These terms appear mostly in the research records.

Arm: one way of answering a question, either a rule or a model with a given set-up. Arms are compared against each other on the same data.
Exemplar: an individual case, inspected before statistics are computed.
Oracle: a judgement that rules cannot make, answered by a model with a probability.
Spike: a small, quick experiment testing whether an approach works at all.

Layout: the arrangement of landmarks and trails over fixed terrain. See Trail layout and regeneration.
Pin: a landmark or trail that regeneration must preserve.
Region: the large simulated landscape from which a board is chosen. See Terrain generation.
Tease: a landmark visible from a viewpoint but deliberately far to walk to.
Terrain: the chosen window sampled onto the board’s hex mesh.
Window: the board-sized part of a region chosen for play.

Greybox: a rough test level built from simple shapes, used to try out movement and cameras before real art exists.
Jackdaw: the brush-based level editor used to author Quell’s test levels.
Persistent: an entity that survives a change of screen. See Screens.
Process, program: one running invocation, and the code it runs. See q_os: processes, terminal and shell.
Screen: a self-contained part of the game, with its own lifecycle and entities. See Screens.
Service: a Bevy plugin providing one area of game behavior, used by screens. See Quell’s application structure.
Spring arm: the mechanism that keeps the tracking camera behind the player and pulls it in when scenery is in the way.
Tracking camera: Quell’s third-person gameplay camera. See Cameras.