Gaylord Nelson's Quotes

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.

Franklin Roosevelt was very concerned about environmental issues.

Teddy Roosevelt of course was a great outdoorsman all his life.

We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.

I think the internal combustion engine will disappear from the streets of our cities in the next thirty years because transportation will be mass transportation, or probably electrical power.

If we continue to address the issue of the environment where we live as though we're the only species that lives here, we'll create a disaster for ourselves.

In the state of Wisconsin it's mandated that teachers in the social sciences and hard sciences have to start giving environmental education by the first grade, through high school.

Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn't even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago.

The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.

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.

By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large.

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

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 '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.

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.

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.

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.