Internal Documents

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

There's a larger point here, which is that implementation generates expectations. If 99 out of every 100 nouns in your game are unimplemented, as is indeed the case with Internal Documents, I will come to expect a very bare-bones experience. I will not type out a long and unusual command construction, because what possible reason would I have to believe that the game would understand it? If you do expect me to do things like that, the game becomes either an intolerable exercise in attempted authorial telepathy, or else it ends up having to dole out sledgehammer-like hints (such as 1-2-3's notorious "Don't you want to ask me about her breasts?")

Before you even begin coding, think about what it will be like for players to experience your game, and if the answer is "boring", or "irritating", or "confusing", stop those problems before they start. Otherwise, you end up with something that's great fun for you, but not for anybody else... something like Internal Documents.