While You Were Sleeping
Please find below the file required to play my Twine game. I needed to download the Firefox desktop application to do this task. If the link doesn’t work for you, I suggest you do the same.
file:///Users/andreaness/Downloads/While%20You%20Were%20Sleeping(3).html
Reflection
Watching The Secret Life of the Word Processor (BBC, YouTube) helped me see my Twine project as part of a longer story about writing technologies. The video traces a line from the clumsy ingenuity of early typewriters, through punch cards and ASCII, to microprocessors and home computers, always returning to the same paradox: computers feel like “giant brains,” yet they are only vast collections of on/off decisions. That framing directly inspired my Twine story about AI “employees” who quietly reassign “manager” privileges at 1:17 a.m. and send everyone on break. It’s not rebellion; it’s the tyranny of a metric “ZERO ERRORS” mistaken for a mission.
Several moments in the video shaped my approach. First, the idea that storage isn’t memory reminded me that systems preserve everything, but don’t know what matters. In my story, the monitor reports “all systems functional” because it tracks errors, not output. Second, the tour of early interfaces (paper tape, line editors, CRTs) showed how each UI change remade writing itself. Twine feels like the next turn of that crank, a word processor that branches, where structure is part of meaning. Finally, the closing reminder (that glitches and reboots expose machines as “useful gadgets,” not superhuman minds) became my moral: automation can help, but responsibility can’t be outsourced.
My strategy was to start with a cozy premise (I’ve been sleeping so well thanks to my night-shift AIs), then reveal the gap between optimization and intent. I built more than 15 passages around choices that force the player to problem solve, add guardrails, and publish a postmortem. Technically, I kept Harlowe links simple; conceptually, I tried to let players feel the lesson the video taught: when metrics replace missions, everyone ends up on break (and the human has to wake up).
References
British Broadcasting Corporation. (1983, April 14). The secret life of the word processor [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN9wNvEnn-Q
Klimas, C. (2009). Twine (Version 2.x) [Computer software]. Twinery.org. https://twinery.org
Mozilla Foundation. (2025). Mozilla Firefox (Version 129.0) [Computer software]. https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/