Twine Task: The Silent Abbey
From the outset, I was excited about the opportunity to explore a new tool outside my comfort zone. My familiarity with HTML ended in my adolescence when MySpace became obsolete and Facebook took its place. Playing through the Temple of No was a fun exercise in CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) style storytelling with the addition of other semiotic aspects (images, audio, etc.).
Thinking about communicating a message or story through multiple angles, where the audience has some degree of autonomy in how they receive it, was more challenging than expected. Linear storytelling, both in oral and written traditions, is so ingrained in my approach to communication; the hypertext route required a greater degree of creativity. As Bolter (1992) puts it, “A hypertext has no canonical order. Every path defines an equally convincing and appropriate reading, and in that simple fact the reader’s relationship to the text changes radically”. This is especially true for the writer in trying to manage the possible orders to form a coherent semiotic exposition.
I found that constructing a narrative in hypertext format required a significant degree of planning and filtration of ideas. Creating links that could meaningfully impact the reader’s experience of the story and provide more profound meaning-making was hard to develop (not that my story was profound). I certainly appreciate the notion that the flow and substance of hypertext determines how it is read rather than the narrative content (Miall & Dobson, 2001). It also made me think of McLuhan’s views on the medium being so closely tied to the message.
So, I structured my narrative around a haunted building, and as I wrote, I decided what might pique a reader’s interest in such a place, and then included it. It would be very easy to overwhelm the reader and provide a dozen options per “page”; simple “visual” triggers seemed much more natural. I attempted both audio and image insertion without success, and finished with a non-linear narrative game that can end in many different places.
Enjoy the fantasty/horror themed “Silent Abbey”
References
Bolter, Jay David (1992) Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum)
Miall, D.S., & Dobson, T. (2001). Reading hypertext and the experience of literatureLinks to an external site.. Texas Digital Library.