For this task I chose to model the story after a DnD style campaign. I really enjoy playing and listening to DnD and it’s a great universe/platform to base a Twine story off of because the characters’ success is determined by rolling a D20. Depending on the number you roll, the outcome can be a success, mixed success, or failure (that’s the basic idea anyway). What I found out quickly was that if I wanted to have non-binary outcomes (yes/no – pass/fail) each “event page” required around 9 possible landing pages. At one point I had to really simplify my story and make sure that all the possible outcomes ended in a way that made sense.
As I was creating the story I couldn’t help but have Ted Nelson’s Xanadu Project floating around in the back of my mind. I found myself taking a dive into the waters of Ted Nelson on YouTube and found his philosophy and determination quite fascinating. I mean, I really do think that Xanadu is a much better platform than the hyperlinking capability we currently have access to – I address this in part in my previous post. When I am doing course work, I am the type of person that closes all applications and tabs and has a fresh screen available. I find I am constantly “command clicking” and often have 5-10+ tabs open at a time to cross reference ideas. Or, if I’m on my desktop, I have multiple windows open where I’m comparing different texts at the same time. Also, on mac, you have access to multiple desktop windows and I usually have 3 windows open with dedicated applications for each window. All this to say, if we had Xanadu we would need really really big screens. I think that Ted Nelson’s idea was WAY ahead of it’s time. That alone is worth huge props! Now with VR and AI we would have the platforms and interfaces to have dozens of hyperlinking pages open at a time.
After completing the Twine, I can see how visualizing every connection all at once can seem overwhelming. If I had continued my story with the detail that I originally imagined, I would want some way of partitioning certain parts of the story so I could only visually see particular “trees” in the “forest”.
