For my third linking post, I was compelled to link to Margaret Nash’s Task #6 Twine, and how it connects to my own personal outside experiences. 

 You can find Magaret’s post HERE

The first thing to note is that I opted to not do this particular task which entailed creating a hypertext game using Twine. You can find information on Twine HERE

What compelled me to link to Margaret’s Twine was if that I had known any better, it could have been mine. From the words and phrases that she chose to the pictures, choices, and moves that were made, this Twine is my daily life struggle laid out in a game for all to play. Even the title is something that is posed to me every single day from the same people that ask Margaret, “What’s for Dinner?” 

I believe that the game was meant to be funny and bring a tinge of sarcastic language to its player, but what made it even more hilarious to me, to the point of actually laughing out loud, was how TRUE it was. I could picture every single sentence and response on her pages because they have all happened to me. Both Margaret and I are moms of boys and this is going to be our daily struggle for the rest of our lives. I think about my husband, and the first thing he does when we go and visit his parents is head to the kitchen to see what there is to eat. #thestruggleisreal

As I was going through her Twine, what I enjoyed the most was how conversational it felt. Of course, the conversation is occurring in our heads, with ourselves, but still – I thoroughly enjoyed this “choose your own dinner adventure” type of layout. The icing on the cake though, was at the very end of the Twine when she wrote,

“Your kids have probably eaten 14 granola bars while you weren’t looking and really aren’t THAT hungry for dinner anyway!!”

I kid you not, my 3-year-old at that exact same moment had a chocolate chip granola bar in his hand and was saying, “Can you open this please?!” It was one of those moments that you couldn’t script if you tried. 

I look at this task overall and I keep coming back to the idea that our experiences shape the way we see language and how we react to it. Lera Boroditsky said that “Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.” When we think about this Twine task, in particular, Margaret used her experiences to create a game using the language she speaks (I’m not talking about English per se, but rather that of her language surrounding food, dinner, meals, etc.). This task for her was intrinsically linked to her own experiences as a Mother of two boys, which is why I was not only able to understand her process and thoughts but was able to connect on it at the level in which I did. 

Also to note though would be that if someone played this game who did not speak English well or was unfamiliar with certain phrases or words such as how devastating it is to not have “guac,” their experience would be quite different than mine. Furthermore, we could also talk about how the place in which we live and the language that we use could be construed as the cliche of “#firstworldproblems.” The struggle to decide what’s for dinner is not necessarily what some people would consider a problem, but then again this game was meant for the audience of MET students, assuming that this wouldn’t be a consideration for us and the experiences that we have. 

Overall, I believe that if I didn’t share these experiences with Margaret my reflection on this linking assignment would be quite different and probably more critical. I see a lot of myself in her reflection of this task. I too am constantly doing work while my kids are playing, practicing, or even sitting on my lap. As we speak I’m using Google Docs to pre-plan my linking assignment and one of the many tabs I have open is report cards for my students. We seem to share in these experiences and I think that makes me see her writing as an extension of my own in a way.