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.

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.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

And if people come up and say they like the movies you're in, it's a great compliment.

Most people compliment me on maintaining my femininity while I'm on the court. People like the fact that I model. My fans or little girls always say they want to play sports, but also want to be a model like me and I think that's great.

Women are so much in love with compliments that rather than want them, they will compliment one another, yet mean no more by it than the men do.

It's been amazing to watch, because for 'Thor', which was always a mid-selling book, to be in the top ten for every single issue since the reboot is just a great compliment.

I've been sampled so much and I'm glad it's happened, it's a great compliment.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

Everybody likes a compliment.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

I refuse the compliment that I think like a man, thought has no sex, one either thinks or one does not.

Actually, I take it as a compliment. Diva is a derivative of divine. That's quite a title to carry around.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

When I got finished, Gershwin paid me the ultimate compliment. He said, 'Boy, even I couldn't do that.'

A girl's got to do what she's got to do to make somebody pay her a compliment. If that means moaning 'til the cows come home, then so be it.

In all unmerciful actions, the worst of men pay this compliment at least to humanity, as to endeavour to wear as much of the appearance of it, as the case will well let them.

The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.

If people did not compliment one another there would be little society.

If my clothing does stand out, then I guess it's a compliment, but I just wear whatever feels comfortable.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

Nothing is more effective than sincere, accurate praise, and nothing is more lame than a cookie-cutter compliment.

By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

For me, it's a compliment to be compared with Marilyn, the unforgettable actress, the most beautiful one of all. But, curves aside, we have very little in common.

If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!

We were told our campaign wasn't sufficiently slick. We regard that as a compliment.

The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn't been any such thing.