Twine…what an incredible learning resource! I am going to work on getting my students to work with Twine.
Honesty time: This was difficult for me. I typically find it hard to come up with creative works. Just not something that I have had much practice in.
I started by taking a blank piece of paper and started flowcharting some potential storylines. It’s easy to see how a “choose your own adventure” type game can get very complicated very quickly.
I chose to go with a survival game. Choices and actions have consequences and this seems like something I would enjoy writing.
For the process of actually writing up the game, I was essentially flipping back and forth between Twine documentation and the software itself. Aside from this referencing, I found it challenging to try and develop different storylines, and in the end, my story lines are anything but robust; however, I can appreciate the work that goes into making something like this.
This reminded me of how we have been reading and thinking about how the medium impacts the creation of a message. After scribbling down my rough flow chart, I had a basic outline, not much different from a traditional outline. Twine allowed me to rearrange the nodes of my network in order to match the order and positioning on my paper. Had I tried to compose a story with different branches and plot lines on paper, this would have been trying to say the least. Doug Engelbart touches on this idea in his 1963 paper about computers augmenting human intellect and ability.
“If the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft became too complex you would compile the reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs. You can integrate your new ideas more easily and thus harness your creativity more continuously if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record” (Engelbart, 1963, pp. 13-14)
Admittedly this kind of notion can be applied to almost any contemporary computing application, but Twine offers a unique perspective as it reads similarly to paper (on a basic Twine level), but can be organized and arranged physically so as to see the flow of the story and branches. I find myself questioning the extent to which the tool that we use influences, or even completely determines the product of human creativity, much in the same way that the linguistic relativity hypothesis would suggest a link between language and thought.
Engelbart also makes the case for an appropriate scope and sequence of learning, and that in order to solve complex problems humans take small steps toward that problem. He called them process hierarchies. A high-order process like writing a story requires a huge amount of sub-processes, and I see Twine as a tool that, as Engelbert would say, effectively augments the human ability to write a better story. Because Twine can be non-linear, this software affords the mind to wander down a given path without losing its previous place. Not only can it be ordered on a page, but it can be reflected in a virtual physical space that mimics the story’s neurological organization.
References
Englebart, Douglas. (1963). “A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect.” In Hawerton, P.W. and Weeks, D.C. (Eds.), Vistas in information handling, Volume I: The augmentation of man’s intellect by machine. Washington, DC: Spartan Books.