Hansel and Gretel_ETEC540 Task5_Sooyoung.html.zip
For this task, I chose to reimagine the familiar narrative of the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel. While the original tale follows a linear path (lost children, gingerbread house, and the encounter with a witch), I wanted to introduce a “plot twist” driven by reader agency. By providing choices, such as whether to enter the house or wait for the owner, I explored how personal cognitive choices can fundamentally reshape a story’s trajectory. I aimed to align the narrative structure with the associative pathways through which the human brain operates as suggested by Bush (1945), rather than traditional linear constraints.
This process highlighted the core differences between print-based and hypertext storytelling. In traditional print, the reader is a passive follower of the author’s singular narrative. In contrast, creating a hypertext in Twine allowed me to experience how non-linear paths foster an interactive environment where the reader’s decisions influence the sequence of information. This transition enabled me to move from being a writer of a fixed story to a designer of complex digital structures, where the act of organizing the hypertext becomes a literal process of construction (Bolter, 2001, Chapter 3).
My experience with Twine was a fascinating departure from Task 4 Handwriting. When I was handwriting, the permanence of ink required me to brainstorm and finalize the entire flow beforehand. However, using Twine encouraged an iterative process where I could constantly intervene in the evolving structure. This also aligns with Nelson’s (1999) emphasis on the essence of writing as a continuous process of rewriting and tracking continuity between versions. Although I had a roadmap, I found myself constantly testing the passages from a user’s perspective, refining the links and narrative progression as I built them.
Due to my current constraints of time and familiarity with Twine, I limited this version to three distinct endings. However, this experiment made me realize how digital technologies are transforming authorship. As writers are no longer just content creators but architects of systems. Likewise, readers are gaining new authority and agency. This shift towards a networked, interconnected system of information fundamentally changes how we both construct and consume literacy in the digital age.
Gemini (Google, 2026) was used to refine the grammar, spelling, and overall clarity of this post.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Chapter 3: Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108.
Nelson, T. (1999). Xanalogical structure, needed now more than ever: Parallel documents, deep links to content, deep versioning and deep re-use. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(4).
