(right click)
My strategy for making my twine was simple: I cheated. I brought in an expert to help me with the whole process because I knew that they would have great ideas for a story and they’re pretty knowledgeable around a computer. The ringer is my 11 year old son, Owen. The minute I showed him the example Twine, he wanted to help me with mine, and I am not turning down any opportunity to spend time with my kids. How did I know he would have good ideas for this assignment? His two favourite gifts from his birthday and Christmas:
We chose space as the theme as he had been playing an online game called “Among Us” a lot and was really into space. He had designed a boardgame loosely based after the videogame; that is where the three main characters came from as they are game pieces for it. Please don’t ask why one is a Pirate and one has a pumpkin on his head… that’s pure Owen; the boy is imaginative. As we worked our way through the story, we decided that not all endings will be happy; far from it. There are four possible endings, and only one allows the character to live. This brought us back to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books; I always found that there were way more opportunities to perish than live in those books (I could be wrong and just have a poor sense of making choices) and found that to be part of the attraction of reading them.
The hypertext linking was definitely like going down a rabbit hole. We could have kept linking off of branches and been completely carried away from the actual plot into a whole other subplot quite easily. I think that is one of the benefits of hypertext within online reading; it can take the reader off on a whole other tandem that they may not have known about. Link that access to curiosity with the real time speed of the internet and you have a powerful tool for information.
A complete aside: if anyone really loved reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books, I highly recommend the board game. There are lots of little pieces and it takes some time getting used to it, but it ends up being a collaborative choose your own adventure. It’s pretty fun watching the members of your family try to come to a consensus on the next move… and they aren’t looking at their devices!!