This article is full of very interesting ideas for IF authors, but it could
benefit from some reworking, particularly in the first half, and above all
in the Simulation section. That has a very long paragraph, full of rich
content, but very difficult to read. It would be good to break that
paragraph up a lot, perhaps into intro, standard IF simulation, use of
timers, immersion and Chekov's gun, simulation as seen in Tomb Raider and
Lemmings, etc. Alternatively a break-up similar to that seen in section III
might be another approach. The latter half of the article flows more easily
than the first, but then the first has many ideas for the reader to think
about. It would be good if they were more easily packaged though, in a form
more convenient to swallow and take on board.
<P>
There are a number of typos / words in the wrong order. These should be
picked up at any final readthrough. But particularly glaring ones were
Bookword (2nd para after Rewards heading) instead of Bookworm, and Genus
instead of Genius (sama para). Also the following para refers to VR and I
just wondered if all the book's readers will know that abbreviation is
Virtual Reality. And staying in that para (the very long one that needs to
be split!) the Tower of Hanoi is cited as a simple example of a simulated
problem. It might be worth adding a footnote here commenting that that very
puzzle is included in Zork Zero.
<P>
In the Intuitition section there's an extra "an" in the first sentence to
be removed. The following paragraph refers to "game-book": as with VR I'm
wondering if all the readers will understand that, or if maybe a footnote
explanation is needed for what that means. I grew up with Choose Your Own
Adventure and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, but many people won't be familiar
with them, or even if they are they may not understand the full meaning of
this reference here.
<P>
A couple more typos: in Geography in sentence "But the real problem is  the
words "and this is" need to replace "and is this". Similarly in the Hooks
para the word "and" probably should be "or" in "players can be
inadvertently solving - or failing to solve - your problem as they catch
the bus or as they sleep ".
<P>
But the article is really strong, full of good ideas, and I particularly
liked the way it used many examples from IF games (and other types of games
e.g. Lemmings, etc.) to illustrate the point. Perhaps the one thing it
doesn't explain is how to go about implementing these puzzles (lots of good
ideas, but how do we actually make use of them?), or even how to start
tackling the complexity of doing so, but that's probably outside the scope
of this book. But as a source of ideas about using puzzles this is a very
comprehensive overview.