Graham Nelson Quotes & Sayings

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

“At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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