A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.

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.

A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.

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

Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!

By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this.

If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

Well, after I had the heart attack, it was a very simple choice. What the doctor told me I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean I stayed away from everything.

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.

We believe that the European Union is facing a truly historic choice.

If you're a sports fan you realize that when you meet somebody, like a girlfriend, they kind of have to root for your team. They don't have a choice.

We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it's a continuing choice.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves.

You always do what you want to do. This is true with every act. You may say that you had to do something, or that you were forced to, but actually, whatever you do, you do by choice. Only you have the power to choose for yourself.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.

Where we have the choice between putting a dollar against those that are going to advance horizontal integration and those that are going to sustain current capability, we'd rather put them against the horizontal integration activity.

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

At only 20 years old I got married. I was still a kid myself, but in those times, if you got someone pregnant, you had no choice but to get married. So I left school and the only thing I could do was sing.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

It was never really my choice to be an action heroine.

This war of choice in Iraq is undermining the very fabric of American society.

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

There are plenty of lesbians in Hollywood, but they're not out. And that's their choice, but I can't do that, it's too important to me.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

I will argue my points; I will have my opinions. But at the end of the day, it's the director's choice.

While war is never anyone first choice, sometimes it is a necessary choice.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

Anything you can do needs to be done, so pick up the tool of your choice and get started.

I expect the Republicans will enjoy a large bounce out of their convention. They're here wrapping themselves in the 9/11 flag, which I think is inappropriate in many ways, but it's their choice.