When I mention that I'm a game designer as well as a writer, someone will nod and say, 'Ah, that's what we like about your script. The videogame feel.'

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

That will only happen if I have a bout of amnesia or if I feel like mooning someone in the audience.