This week’s task was to create a Twine ‘game’ as a means of exploring hypertext.

Here is my ‘game’ Travel Adventures. Please let me know if it does not load properly, or elements of the game don’t work. Some of the branches contain multiple images and may take a few moments to load.

Reflection:

Prior to this week I did not understand the meaning of hypertext, I had heard the term in passing and by extension understood that it related to the internet but had not investigated it. When reading Bolter’s Hypertext and the Remediation of Print (2001) I realized that I had not really contemplated the interconnected nature of information on the internet.

I am not an overly creative person when it comes to writing, something that was a challenge when approaching this week’s task. The idea that I came up with was to create a travelogue featuring my own photos (to avoid copyright infringement) for the included destinations and activities included in the ‘game’ instead of writing a fictional Choose Your Own Adventure style game like The Temple of No.

One of the key elements of hypertext that I wanted to bring into my ‘game’ was to go beyond the interconnections of my Twine and incorporate the interconnected writings of the wider internet (Bolter, 2001). It was for this reason that I included links to additional information and other sources throughout the various destinations of the ‘game’.

This was my first experience using Twine and as such much of the time I had available for creating my Twine was spent ironing out the mechanics of making Twine do what I wanted. I had a true hypertext experience as it took a number of internet searches to determine how to embed, not just link, my own images in Twine, and experimentation with the different cloud-based storage sites I use to find one that would allow permissionless viewing. After success with my images, I turned to linking external sites that would open in a new browser tab/window so that the player didn’t have to restart the game to return to their position in the game after clicking a link, this took several iterations and searches to accomplish, though if I had previous experience in HTML coding this would have been much faster.

The time spent on the mechanics of the ‘game’ meant that I did not have enough time to go into the level of content and detail I would have liked. Several of my screens are simply self-abasing messages that given more time I would have added more, though if looking at this like a Choose Your Own Adventure there needs to be a few paths that dead-end while others continue farther. Given more time I also would have experimented more with the appearance, formatting and multimedia of the screens.

In the end it may not be the most creative or stylistic Twine and there is certainly room for improvement, but I am proud of what I was able to accomplish.

References:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Hypertext and Remediation of Print. In, Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110