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.

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.

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.

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.

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

I ain't a bit ashamed of anything.

You never so much want to be happy with a woman as when you know that you're ceasing to care for her.

Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.

Netflix is amazing 'cause they trust the creator to do their job, and they trust us to do our job. They're really smart and just let us do our thing and deliver a great job.

No!" Amy said. "Dan, you're lucky it was only concussive. You could've wiped out the whole Holt family." "And that would've been bad because...?

Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale.

It is not the particular man in power that I oppose, but the power itself, which is unjust.