After appreciating the power of the interconnectedness of oral storytelling last week, I was excited to play and create with Twine. I was hoping that it would allow a more ‘natural’ way of writing, instead of the linear, topical tradition of writing I am used to. I was hoping this medium would allow my writing to be more similar to what Bush decribes as happening in our brains when he speaks of how “it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain (1945, p 106). Whereas what I was used to in writing is typically more consistent with the idea that “[i]n the static medium of print, the writer must normally settle on one hierarchy, one order of topics, although he may find that the topics could be arranged equally well in, say, three orders corresponding to three electronic outlines.’ (Bolter, 2001, p 32).
This was not my first time playing a Twine, but it was my first creating one. My struggles with how to take all the paths my brain automatically creates and jumps between and turn it into a viable game through Twine quickly became a daunting task. I had began trying to make a game that my students could use as a model to show their understanding of the brain’s functioning and fight, flight or freeze response. The three paths that my brain created within a moment quickly became two, and then shrank even more because of the challenges I faced with understanding how to make the path flow as easily as it would have if I was able to orally describe the story. This made me connect to a specific part of Englebart’s model, the “H-LAM/T system (Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which he is Trained)” (1963). I was using my first language, artifacts (although I wish I could have used sound as well), and the methodology of my culture’s storytelling as well as the structure laid out by the tool itself, but it was my lack of training that was the limiting factor this time. One part of Twine that was for me frustrating was the fact that I couldn’t see all the pieces of story all at once. I had to try to remember what was in each box based off the title, and because of my lack of training in Twine, this didn’t go well. So while the power of hypertext is clearly evident in using Twine, I wasn’t sure how to use some of the best features of hypertext. It reminded me again of Bolter as he described the power of an ebook over a physical book because he states that “the eBook turns any text into a hypertext, in which the reader can search for the occurrence of words and phrases throughout the text, so that the whole text becomes immediately available to the reader in a way a printed book is not.” (Bolter, 2001, p 80-81). Without being able to see the details of my story as a whole text, I struggled to maintain the flow of my ideas in the way that I would have liked. Was it just lack of training on the tool? Or was it a disconnect between my thinking and the creation.
References:
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108.
Englebart, Douglas. (1963). “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect (Links to an external site.).” In Hawerton, P.W. and Weeks, D.C. (Eds.), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Washington, DC: Spartan Books. Available (as “Augmentation of human intellect: A conceptual framework”)