If you’re setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.

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.

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.

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.

The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of ‘Curses’ makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of ‘Hamlet’ but none is planned.

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.

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.

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

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