To play my Twine “choose your adventure” story/game, click the link below to download the file and it open it. It will run in your default browser.
Reflection
In the creation of my Twine, I wanted to play with Bolter’s notion that “Despite its apparently ephemeral and ethereal quality, electronic writing maintains a sense of place in the physical world.” (2001. pp.29). I thought that writing a hypertext story-game based in a virtual world (Minecraft) might blur the lines between physical and digital. The player interacts with the text virtually while interacting with their computer physically, and the story of the game itself takes place in a virtual facsimile of the real wilderness. Bolter also says “electronic hypertext […] uses the printed book as its object of remediation.” (pp.45), which also made me think that composing a written story (primitive) from a video game (advanced) would be a bit of a reversal; the printed book is not being remediated, rather a new art form has evolved in parallel with print.
After reading the history of hypertext in the early days of the internet (and before), it was challenging to craft a Twine that would live up to the early imaginings and be interconnected rather than linear. I tried to build my story such that it would be recursive and interconnected as Bush described of the possibilities of the memex: “at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button […] numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail […] as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book […] any item can be joined into numerous trails.” (1945). While learning the code of Twine was challenging for me, it pales in comparison to how complicated it might have been in Bush’s day to link texts without modern computer technology. I struggle to think of how he even imagined such a notion without first seeing a simple (and less utilitarian) application of hypertext like Twine.
Finally, I had some fun with the code itself and seeing what I could do with Twine in the limited amount of time I had. While there’s so much more that can, and has, been done, I am reminded of Doug Engelbart “[the] human mind neither learns nor acts by large leaps but by steps organized or structured so that each one depends upon previous steps”(1962). The expectation of this assignment was (hopefully) not that of a large leap but of steps mindful of historical context.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1)
Engelbart, D. C., (1962). Augmenting human intellect: A conceptual framework. STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA.