AR: I think a lot of the conventions of IF are really showing their age. The whole command system is kind of dated – you know, it originates with the ‘70s teletype era stuff. When I showed Whom the Telling Changed at the Slamdance Games Festival in 2006, I got to watch a bunch of people who had no idea what interactive fiction or even necessarily computer games were come up to it and try to do something with it. What was immediately obvious in that format was that for most people, it was just too confusing or the interface was too frustrating for people to discover what was interesting. That really started making me think, “okay, what can be done to change this?” It’s like if you’re writing a book, they tell you that you have one paragraph to grab peoples’ attention before they’ll move on to the next book on the shelf. In interactive fiction, usually in that first paragraph, a person’s experience is something like, “I don’t understand” or whatever and interface frustration is tied into peoples’ initial encounter with it. That’s something that I hope I can continue working on here at UC Santa Cruz: coming up with new ways that you can take that sort of literary-based game experience and make it so that anyone can just sit down and right away start figuring out how it works and how to use it. I think the keywords in Lacuna are a step in that direction, but I think there are more steps that can be taken too.