For this Twine task, I took inspiration from the choose-your-own adventure books that I grew up reading. I wanted to create a pathway through the hypertext that I created that led to the ideal possible outcome, which in my story was being hired for your dream job at a very peculiar company. The ability to interact with the pieces of writing in a variety of reading orders, as mentioned by Bolter (2001), really reinforced for me a strength of hypertext. The reader is able to have a higher level of interactivity with the text, which I found to be more engaging than simply reading through a passage. Typically, higher levels of engagement and enjoyment can be linked to higher levels of comprehension of what was being read.
The generation of the text was very organic, with no prewriting or thought to structure, as opposed to the steps I would take writing a traditional narrative text. A strength of the Twine platform was the malleability of the passages, manipulating them as I wrote rather than designating the organization beforehand. While being very familiar with conventional prose writing, I had minimal experience working with this type of coding language. The data structures provided within the Twine program really allowed for me to visualize the hypertext and the interconnection between the passages.
The ease of the creation and visualization of this small hypertext Twine story really opened my eyes to the sheer size and accomplishment of the texts that are being produced as part of the Internet. We as people seem to place significantly different values on traditionally printed text than that found within the online sphere, when the main difference exists solely on the manner of interaction. Bolter’s (2001) point about needing to negotiate the remediation of printed text and electronic writing really resonated with my experience since I needed to rely upon traditional printing skills to complete this story, but applying them in a new, code-based digital environment.
ETEC.html
References
Chapter 3 of Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hi Braden,
Your story is so enaging and fun! I was glued to the screen the whole time I was playing it! How did you manage to upload it to your blog? I was struggling with this task and would love to learn how you had managed to do it. I was able to access yours within seconds. Thanks so sharing.
Hi Nataliia,
I downloaded my Twine task from the website as an HTML file and then uploaded it onto my WordPress blog post. Hope that helps! (even though the response is much later!)