This week, I have prepared for you a story written with the Twine interface. It can be found here…
Marlis’ Week 5 Twine Assignment
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Twine is the ‘Choose your own adventure’ books that I used to enjoy as a child. One would read the story up to a certain point, and then one would have to make a choice as to the next step of the story; if you choose x then turn to page 12, if you choose y then turn to page 15. Sometimes the choices would bring a quick end to the story, and other times the choices would continue the story much longer. I used to go back and re-follow all the other choices so that I could find out what all the other possibilities were – sort of like being able to see all your possible futures depending on what choices you make at what points in your life.
The process of creating a twine (even one as small as this one) is quite a laborious task, it took a lot longer than I thought it would and I underestimated the amount of time it would take to create the short 21 slide story I ended up with. “All writers have had the experience of being overwhelmed with ideas as they write.” (Bolter, 2001). I needed to have a basic storyline mapped out beforehand, and then map out all the possible choices and links. Once my story was roughly mapped out, I needed to go back and make sure that it made sense, and that there were no dead ends. Although no conventional ‘document’ was created, word processing skills were in use in that I could go back, cut/paste/copy and edit text as I went along. The flow-chart design definitely makes the visualization and organization of the process much easier, illustrating the process Bolter describes when students “…sketch out topics and connect them through lines of association…” I can imagine that with the right amount of time and coding expertise, one can come up with some very elaborate games (just like The Temple of No). To be honest, this isn’t my first effort with Twine – when I took ETEC 565D (the gaming course), I created another one for an assignment – here is a link to it if anyone is interested… IP #3 Learning through Game Design
Hypertexting on a webpage makes things convenient for connecting to relevant and related information, but one runs the danger of ‘falling down a rabbit hole’, so to speak. Bolter (2001) speaks of how each link leads to other pages that ‘…in turn lead the reader to other pages. The process can continue indefinitely as the reader moves through a textual space. that…can extend throughout the Internet.” There is so much information that is connected on the web that one can easily get overwhelmed. News stories will often have numerous links interspersed within the article or at the bottom that can keep one clicking and reading for hours. That being said, research is made much more efficient where one doesn’t have to go to a card catalogue and pull numerous volumes of books to pore over, rather relevant links in an article can save time where one need only click to access further information. If I was to think of web-page hypertext links in the same way I thought of my childhood ‘choose your own adventure’ books, I would never be able to go back and explore every possible link. There will have to be some choices left unexplored.
Oh, and the page that leads to the Zork game was a suggestion from my husband – it was a text-based game that he used to play. In order to advance, one has to enter simple commands such as ‘open mailbox’, ‘read letter’, etc. I thought it might be somewhat applicable.
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space : Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.