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.

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.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

He who avoids complaint invites happiness.

Certainly there was no just cause of complaint from the Northern States - no advantage was ever sought or obtained by them for their section of the Republic.

Be able to suffer wearing a necktie or slightly high heels for an entire evening without complaint or early removal.

I think the elections have gone well, although there is so much insecurity in Iraq. So far during the counting of ballots, there has not been a significant complaint. We have to wait to see what the outcome of the counting is.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

Ibrahim tells his story without a grain of complaint, and this was true for all of the band members. This is very much part of the Cuban spirit and soul.

With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.

I'm happy when I'm juggling, but I feel like I've gone from, like, 3 balls to 10 bowling balls. But, that's a good problem. I don't really have a complaint about that.

The complaint of bad pay, and difficulty in obtaining it, is almost generally reiterated through every department of education.

Firmness in enduring and exertion is a character I always wish to possess. I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint and cowardly resolve.

A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.

Know how to effectively voice a complaint or make a claim at a retail store.

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.

Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

I'm glad to see that women have an important role within the industry. My no. 1 complaint would still be that most women are very submissive and victims. I would like to see women portrayed in a much stronger and intelligent capacity.

Two minutes later the right arm was pointing normally and the reaction to the left appeared. The patient made no complaint at all about the experiment.

I filed the ethics complaint against Tom DeLay not because I'm a Democrat and he's a Republican or even because he drew me out of my congressional seat but because he engaged in corruption to further his plans to disenfranchise voters in Texas.

The most frequent complaint I hear from college students is that professors inject their leftist political comments into their courses even when they have nothing to do with the subject.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

The usual complaint is, 'I have no other way of earning a living.' The harsh reply can be, 'Do you have to live?'

As many will remember, a respected Army Corps economist filed a whistleblower complaint about the Corps' use of faulty data to justify lock and dam expansion.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?