To preface, it was a challenging week because of a tragic incident that resulted in us losing our two miniature horses. Our daughter said goodbye to her beloved pet and companion. I have fictionalized some parts of what she has experienced in the creation of a narrative.

Here is the link to the host site for my Twine Story. The .html file needs to be downloaded to be played.

Reflection

The process of creating this story or game began with choosing a narrative that resisted being linear in structure. The nameless protagonist (or player) chooses what to do with the day, but ends up circling back to the same place until confronted with a choice to go outside and revisit the site of a tragic incident. There is no obvious resolution, nor is there a climactic moment, which echoes Bolter’s (2001) point about ancient Greek scrolls contributing to narratives that lacked “climactic endings” (p. 78). In one of the Twine passages, I attempted to use conventions of texting language to replicate a conversation. It became quickly clear to me how clueless I am at its nuanced spellings and shorthand. Most of the students I teach would likely see it as out-of-date and out of touch, which is true. I had to shush what McCulloch (2020) refers to as the “imagined judge” of correct language while writing and instead try to stay focused on an actual audience such as my daughter. Coding and writing in Twine felt foreign and mechanical, as the act of testing each passage became tedious due to my lack of familiarity or training (Englebart, 1963). It was also challenging to simply make decisions about how much text suited a passage. After hours of incorrectly coding text for a desired effect, I gave up and just started creating more passages. Using Twine as hypertext was at once a foreign and familiar experience of attempting to create and maintain interactivity (Bolter, 2001). The text creator must play with possibilities and think structurally and strategically about the narrative. The user is obliged to play by exploring what has been set out and coming to conclusions that may differ from my intended ones.

References

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110

Englebart, Douglas. (1963). “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect.” In Hawerton, P.W. and Weeks, D.C. (Eds.), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Washington, DC: Spartan Books. Available (as “Augmentation of human intellect: A conceptual framework”)

McRaney, D. (Host) (2020, November 29) Because internet. (No. 194). [Audio podcast episode]. In You are not so smart. https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/