I try to make puzzles range all the way from easy to hard, and to leave many open at once.

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.

Society just has a way of inhibiting you, which is good and bad.

I love books. I read voraciously, and I happened to have been fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time.

Hillary Clinton wants to put all the miners out of business.

As I do with most films, I try and find some music that you could use throughout, not just a sampling of lots of different artists.

I'm never shaken or stirred.

Good attitudes among players do not guarantee a team's success, but bad attitudes guarantee it's failure.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.

Remember also, the present is your only time to be saved. There is no believing, no repenting, no conversion in the grave---no minister will speak to you there. This is the time of conversion.

It's amazing in the blink of an eye you finally see the light.