Daily Inspiration Quote by Graham Nelson

Nelson is smuggling a whole design philosophy into a deceptively practical checklist: research isn’t homework, it’s the engine of plausibility. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a headline most players already “know,” which is exactly why he insists you go to a library and chase the clutter around the headline: clothes, furniture, cars, side-news. Those details aren’t trivia; they’re the texture that stops a historical setting from collapsing into a museum diorama or, worse, a modern story wearing a 1962 hat.

The key phrase is “other issues were in the news.” It’s a quiet rebuke to the lazy dramatization that treats the era as single-plot. Real time is crowded. While the world flirted with nuclear war, people still argued about local politics, watched TV, bought appliances, worried about rent. Putting that noise into a game makes the crisis feel more frightening, not less, because it frames catastrophe as something that can arrive in the middle of ordinary life.

“Especially include things which now seem foreign” is the real tell. Nelson isn’t asking for period-correct wallpaper out of reverence; he wants estrangement. The foreign detail punctures the player’s sense of inevitability and hindsight. It reminds us that the past didn’t know it was “the past,” and that people navigated their world with different defaults, anxieties, and comforts. In interactive fiction terms, that’s also a method for storytelling: objects and habits become narrative props, quietly teaching the player how to think inside a different moment rather than merely observing it.