Way back when Mario was still a mere twinkling in Miyamoto's eye, I was the proud owner of a state-of-the-art Commodore 64 microcomputer. It came with a game development s- tem called "The Quill," which allowed anyone to create their own text-based adventure games. It may have been incredibly crude, but it suddenly put at my fingertips the thrill of enterta- ing my nearest and dearest by devising "interactive challenges" of my own. Unfortunately, I knew little about game design, and rather than easing my players into a new and alien world, I treated them as opponents that had to be defeated...