Graham Nelson
Graham Nelson
Graham A. Nelsonis a British mathematician and poet and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fictiongames. He has also authored several IF games, including the acclaimed Cursesand Jigsaw, using the experience of writing Curses in particular to expand the range of verbs that Inform is capable of understanding. He has been described by The New York Times as "ornately literate."...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMathematician
elements way different
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.
trying way easy
I try to make puzzles range all the way from easy to hard, and to leave many open at once.
past shoes growing
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.
games issues car
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.
fighting player games
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.
fundamentals way fiction
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.
winning games people
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.
gone use shapes
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.
writing adventure home
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.
player careers decision
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.
broken-heart care fortnight
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.