This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all.

The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.

I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all.

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive.

I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over.

At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.

You can make anything by writing

When you're fighting for economic and social justice, you're always fighting for the minority.

Every single substitute teacher growing up could not pronounce my name, so whenever someone pauses, I'm like, "Oh, that's me."

Canonization in modern times is a very, almost scientific process.

There are only two kinds of class: First class and no class.

I need to pay people to make me work out, or I wouldn't do it.

Like most animals, we're wired to associate height with power.

The brain happens to be a meat machine.

I wish to have a muscular body.

His locked, lettered, braw brass collar, Shewed him the gentleman and scholar.