Well this turned out to be a challenge! I had never used Twine before and wanted to try it out. I learned by trial and error and came to discover I had technical difficulties adding photos or music to my story. I carried on without and tried to make use of the other features available such as special text styles, colour, and movement options to keep the story interesting. In a couple of places I added (INSERT IMAGE OF X, Y, ETC HERE) so the reader could get the idea of where I would have enhanced the story with photos.

I loved ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books as a child so thought that Twine would lend itself well to that style. I wanted to use the hypertext links in such a way that there was only one correct ‘path’ to get to the end of the story. I learned how I could lead the reader to a ‘fork in the road’ and choose between two options, and if they chose the ‘wrong’ one, the story linked them back earlier in the ‘path’ so that they could continue.

Playing ‘The Temple of No’ gave me a good idea of what’s possible in Twine, and despite my roadblocks I had fun doing this project. I plan to recommend Twine to our Teacher-Librarian who also teaches technology to our students. In trying to explain how ‘hypertext’ works to those unfamiliar, I think Bolter’s definition would give them a good idea – ‘a hypertext is like a printed book that the author has attacked with a pair of scissors and cut into convenient verbal sizes. The difference is that the electronic hypertext does not simply dissolve into a disordered heap, because the author also defines a scheme of electronic conditions to indicate relationships among the slips’ (p. 35).

Please find the link to my ‘Choose your Own Adventure’ below. Enjoy!

Task 5.html

Reference

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110