Possibility Space
The range of all possible outcomes in a given scenario, which helps to illuminate not only likely outcomes, but patterns in less common outcomes as well.
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Origin
Rooted in Andrey Kolmogorov's 1933 formalization of probability spaces — the set of all possible outcomes in a system — the term migrated into game design through designers like Will Wright, who used it to describe the full landscape of player choices in games like SimCity. The concept also appears in complexity science and formal logic as "state space," mapping every reachable configuration of a system.
Updated February 22, 2026