I’ve made a Twine before as part of the MET program, specifically for a group project on Behaviourism. I found that to be much easier than making this one, because we had a specific goal in mind about what we wanted to communicate. It included an introduction and overview, applications in the classroom, how behaviourism is used in games, and a classroom scenario. Viewers were able to explore the components in whatever order they liked, but once they were in the classroom scenario, they had to navigate through to the completion. The classroom scenario portion was complete when the user had successfully chosen and implemented a behaviourism based reward system to encourage positive student behaviour within their classroom. Making that presentation was fun because we had a clear concept and goal for it. I found making this one to be much more difficult and somewhat tedious because I didn’t have an idea or concept for it that I was excited about and it didn’t gain much from using the Twine platform. I did spend some time ensuring that there was a circular structure to my story, which was new to me. I found it difficult to make up a story “on the fly” that consistently looped back to the very beginning and I think focusing on the structure in that way was limiting and ultimately made it somewhat uninteresting.
That being said, I do see a lot of value in using Twine and in using tools that allow information to be presented in non-linear and interactive ways. Professionally, I use hyperlinks in a very functional way to make things easier for myself. For example, when I create my yearly overviews, unit plans, and lesson plans, I use hyperlinks to link the various documents in order to have information very easily accessible without ending up with one dense, difficult to navigate document. While not published, my digital files do what is described in the beginning of Chapter 3 of Writing Space, where “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.” I use hyperlinks within my documents to quickly link and reference lessons, videos, websites, or sources. In doing this, I create a network of very useful documents for me. If I were to print out these documents, they would be nearly unusable because it would become difficult to know which document was referring to each one, and the external links wouldn’t be present at all. If a word processor was called an ‘idea processor’ because of the ability to easily manipulate language, then hyperlinks build on this to create more complex links between ideas. The ability to present information in a non-linear way allows others to explore content based on their interests and priorities or allows writers to organize their own thoughts and ideas in a way that is logical for them.
And as one last aside, when I went back and reread the content in my Twine and navigated through it, I realized that I had dropped periods at the end of sentences within the game without thinking about it at all. Perhaps because as Gretchen McCulloch mentioned, the structure of Twine doesn’t require it and my mind used the “]]” at the end of each thought as punctuation? None of my links were more than one sentence so a period or full stop became unnecessary.
