Last summer I played around in Twine during the Digital Games summer institute. My learning was at a very basic level and I found the program frustrating. I decided to give Twine a second try for this assignment. I was pleasantly surprised with the changes that were made in the Twine program. Last time I needed to know the coding to change the color of the font, or the style of the text, and now these options are possible with the click of a button. Being able to change the style or color of the text allows the creator to add emphasis, or a tone, to the storyline (Zaltzman, 2019). It allowed me to make the text say more than just what the words were saying, and add emphasis to certain pieces of text.
When I started brainstorming ideas for this task, I had memories of the choose-your-own-adventure books my school library had when I was a kid. The books allowed the reader to read until a certain point, and then choose the next part of the story. The reader would turn to a specific page to continue on with the story. Creating a twine story/game is like creating a choose your own adventure book. The main difference being that unlike the choose-your-own-adventure books that have a limited number of pages, “phrases in the text or portions of the graphics on the Web page can be “hot”: clicking on them will bring up a new page. One page can be linked electronically to many others” (Bolter, 2001, p. 27). That being said, having the ability to link passages to many others can be both a blessing and a curse. I found that I would have ideas and would branch my storyline, but then I would get confused/overwhelmed at times as I had too many paths going on and it was hard to keep track of the storylines. This was amplified by the Twine program in that you can’t see what is written in each passage. I felt like I had to open one passage after another to see what they had written in them. This is very different from writing on paper and having the ease of flipping back a page to see what was written, or writing on a scroll with a path that is very linear.
The final product in Twine is such a fun way to present text in the form of a story/game. Bolter (2001) discusses how on “the computer we have already come to regard this layered writing and readings as natural” (p. 27) and I can see how true that statement is. My children read/played my Twine creation and worked their way through the choices and hyperlinks on their own. Had it been a book form, I don’t know that it would have been as easy for them. My children understand books to be read from front cover to back, and while they would have managed through, it would be more difficult for them to flip back and forth between specific pages. Some cultures read books back to front, or text goes up and down on a page, so I realize that there are books that would be a different experience for my children as well. There was just an ease at which they navigated through the Twine and hypertext. Hypertext structures are a new form of writing (Bolter, 2001). A form of writing, and reading that the current generation of students will never know a life without.
References
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Zaltzman, H. (Host). (2019, July 13). New Rules (No. 102) [Audio podcast episode]. In The Allusionist. Creative Commons Attribution. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/new-rules