The Casebook
Two rungs, one discipline. On the small stuff the cases are petty occurrences at a child’s scale — a lunchbox off its peg, a tap left running, a gate that will not shut. On the real thing they are invented cases run with real procedure. Either way you walk the place, pick things up, ask for the things you have to ask for, and then do the hard part sitting down: say what each item is actually worth, and file.
What you can show and what you believe are two different things. Everything else the detective genre sells — the leap, the hunch, the accusation that lands — is the reflex a citizen most needs not to have. So no case here has a culprit and no ending names one. Every case carries one question people reach for that none of its records can answer, and the game’s answer to it is always the same: this is not something these records can show, and it is not something this game will help you say about anybody.
Gathering costs nothing. It never will. There is no resource to spend on evidence, no limit on how much you may read, and no reward for reading less. The only cost in the whole game is waiting: a record you have to ask for comes back after the day ends, which is the one real latency in the procedure and is carried here with the statute that sets the clock.
You are standing in the first room. Walk to a fixture and use the buttons that appear. Gathering costs nothing here and never will.
Pick a rung, then pick a case. Walk the place with the arrow keys, WASD or the on-screen pad; turn in quarter turns; stand at a thing and use the buttons that appear. Gathering is free and always will be — nothing here is behind a resource. Some things have to be asked for and come back later, so end the day and come back. At the desk you weigh every item you hold against every question the case asks, decide which items the record lets you put in order, and file. Filing does not score you. It reads back what your record supports, what it does not, and what would be needed to know.
The real thing — Invented cases run with real procedure: what each kind of record shows, what it cannot show, how a request works and how long it takes, and where a careful reader stops. Nobody is accused here either, and that is not a softening — it is what the record actually supports. Nothing is scored, nothing is saved and nothing leaves this device. This is not legal advice; a real matter with real stakes belongs with a lawyer, and the game says so at the desk rather than in a footnote.
The meeting on the calendar
A released calendar shows a meeting between an official and an applicant three days before a permit decision. What does the record establish?
The office, the applicant, the permit and everybody involved are invented. What a released calendar can and cannot show is exactly what a real one can and cannot show.
- Day
- 1
- In the casebook
- 0 of 8
- Asked for
- 0
- Independent sources held
- 0
Walk up to a fixture and its buttons appear here. Every fixture in this place is also listed in text mode, which is the same case on the same state.
What each weight means, and what makes a finding
- does not reach it — This item is in your file and it says nothing about this question. Keeping it is right; counting it would not be.
- consistent with it — This item fits the answer without showing it. Most evidence lives here, and most bad reasoning happens by quietly promoting an item out of it.
- establishes it — This item, by itself, shows the thing it is being asked about. Very few records do this and every one of them can be undercut by something about how it was made.
A finding needs weight AND independence, so the arithmetic is deliberately unable to be satisfied by one item: the most any single item can be worth is two, which is less than three. That is the mechanic saying the thing the whole game is about — one source is where a question starts, never where it ends.
A record proves what it records and nothing beside it. Everything else in this casebook is that sentence, applied.
The rules of evidence this is built out of, and who publishes them
- A witness may speak to what they actually know first-hand, and not to what they worked out afterwards.
It is why a statement in this game can never rise above 'consistent with'. Somebody telling you what happened is a record that they said it. The saying is real; the happening is a separate question with its own evidence.
Federal Rule of Evidence 602 — personal knowledge
Federal Rules of Evidence, published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts - Before a record proves anything, somebody has to show it is what it is claimed to be.
It is why one work order about a clock can knock the time off a door log without touching a single entry in it. The log is not lying. The thing that wrote the timestamps was wrong, and nobody had checked.
Federal Rule of Evidence 901(a) — authenticating or identifying evidence
Federal Rules of Evidence, published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts - An agency answering 'no records' has told you about its filing cabinet, not about the world.
Absence of a record is the single most over-read result in this whole subject. It is consistent with the thing never happening, and equally consistent with it never being written down, being written down somewhere else, or being written down and destroyed on a lawful schedule.
How a 'no responsive records' response is read
FOIA.gov — how requests are processed and what a response means - Business days a federal agency has to determine whether it will comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, counted from receipt. It is a deadline for a DECISION, not for the documents, and an agency may take up to ten more business days in unusual circumstances with written notice.5 U.S.C. §552(a)(6)(A)(i), via FOIA.gov
- One statute, one kind of body. The federal Freedom of Information Act reaches federal executive-branch agencies; a city clerk, a county sheriff and a school district answer to their own state's public-records law instead, with its own clock and its own exemptions. Asking the wrong body under the wrong law is the commonest way a first request comes back with nothing.FOIA.gov — what FOIA covers and where state records requests go
Every person, address, business and case in this game is invented, and every case says so on its own face. What is real is the method: what each kind of record shows, what it cannot show, why a second independent source matters, and the two rules of evidence the adult rung names with the authority that publishes them. The thresholds this game adds up with — how much weight makes a finding, how many days a request takes to come back — are MODELED — NOT SOURCED and labelled as such here and in the arcade registry. This is not legal advice, and a real matter with real stakes belongs with a lawyer.
The whole game is one distinction. What you can show is what your record carries when somebody else reads it. What you believe is yours and may well be right, and it is not the same thing, and the moment those two are allowed to blur is the moment a person gets treated as guilty by a stack of paper that never said so. No case here ends with a culprit, because a game that hands you the pleasure of accusing somebody is training the exact reflex a citizen most needs not to have.
Nothing here is scored, saved or sent anywhere — on either rung, nothing at all is written to this device, because a page a child can reach cannot know who is holding it. If a grown-up wants to know how it went, the way they find out is the child telling them. Every person, address, business and case is invented and each case says so on its own face; no real person or organisation is named. What is real is the method and the two rules of evidence it is built out of, each carried with the authority that publishes it. This is not legal advice, and a real matter with real stakes belongs with a lawyer.