For Task 5, I created a game called The Hunt for the Lost Stuffed Animal using Twine. The game invites players to explore different areas of a home and playground to search for a missing toy, with multiple branching paths and optional choices that influence the outcome. I built 18 screens, aiming for a story that was simple and easy to follow. I had planned to include pictures and audio, but found this challenging, so I focused on keeping the story clear and playable. To add personality, I included emojis and thought about how elementary students might engage with the story. While the game might be too complex for my first and second graders, I could imagine sharing it with a buddy class of older students or using it as a model for students to create their own branching narratives.
Bolter (2001) argues that digital technology reshapes how we read and write, allowing readers to move flexibly through text rather than follow a single path. Bush (1945) described a similar idea in his vision of the memex, where knowledge could be linked back and forth through pathways. Creating this Twine game gave me a hands-on sense of these ideas: hypertext allowed players to move forward and backward, revisit earlier screens, and explore optional routes, creating a non-linear experience. When a family member tested the game, they suggested being able to return to the start. I thought this was a great point, so I added a link back on my ending screens. The whole process reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure books I enjoyed as a child, though Twine feels more immediate and interactive since navigation happens with a click rather than flipping pages.
A challenge was making sure the pathways didn’t confuse players. I had to carefully consider when to offer choices versus guiding the story and troubleshoot broken links, which was a valuable learning process. Overall, this task showed me how hypertext can make narratives interactive, engaging, and flexible, and it sparked ideas for using interactive storytelling in classrooms to support student choice, creativity, and collaboration. Finally, I realized how much more engaging the game could have been with visuals and audio; just as sound effects and music enhance movies, they could add another layer of immersion to a Twine story. This experience also made me wonder: how might adding sound and audio change the way students interpret or emotionally connect with a story?
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101–108.