"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"
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Nelson’s deadpan is doing two jobs at once: managing expectations and staking out a quietly radical set of priorities. The first sentence sounds like a developer’s progress report stripped of glamour - “getting Inform into a decent shape” - which is precisely the point. It frames authorship not as inspiration but as maintenance: polishing tools, hardening interfaces, making something usable by strangers. For a mathematician-turned-language designer, that’s an ethos. The real creative act isn’t the sequel, it’s the system.
Then he pivots to “Curses,” and the joke lands because it’s structured like a proof. “I suppose” and “conceivable” are the hedges of someone who thinks in constraints, not hype. He compares his own plot’s sequel-ability to Hamlet’s, which is funny because Hamlet is the canonical story that shouldn’t have room left: everyone’s dead, the moral universe is spent. By invoking it, Nelson deflates the fan impulse to demand more narrative product. If you can imagine Hamlet 2, you can imagine anything; that doesn’t make it a good idea.
The subtext is also a small manifesto about interactive fiction culture. Curses is beloved, but Inform is infrastructure - and infrastructure is thankless unless you care about the medium’s future. Nelson signals that he’s choosing community capacity over personal brand: fewer novels, better tools. The wry humility (“none is planned”) is boundary-setting masquerading as banter, the kind that keeps fandom warm while keeping the roadmap honest.
Then he pivots to “Curses,” and the joke lands because it’s structured like a proof. “I suppose” and “conceivable” are the hedges of someone who thinks in constraints, not hype. He compares his own plot’s sequel-ability to Hamlet’s, which is funny because Hamlet is the canonical story that shouldn’t have room left: everyone’s dead, the moral universe is spent. By invoking it, Nelson deflates the fan impulse to demand more narrative product. If you can imagine Hamlet 2, you can imagine anything; that doesn’t make it a good idea.
The subtext is also a small manifesto about interactive fiction culture. Curses is beloved, but Inform is infrastructure - and infrastructure is thankless unless you care about the medium’s future. Nelson signals that he’s choosing community capacity over personal brand: fewer novels, better tools. The wry humility (“none is planned”) is boundary-setting masquerading as banter, the kind that keeps fandom warm while keeping the roadmap honest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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