Reflection
Similar to The Temple of No, I wanted to create a game where the player could choose their own pathways and not follow a linear narrative. Rather than writing a script beforehand, I decided to write the story in Twine as I went along. Bush (1999, as cited in Bolter 2001) argues that this is how the human mind thinks, with thoughts forming through association. Hypertexts reflect this thought process and allow the mind to wander and explore different ideas. It was interesting to use Twine to build a story because I could visually see how the different passages connected with each other and physically manipulate them to map out how I wanted to structure the narrative.
While I started off with ambitious ideas of a story with multiple pathways, I quickly realized how time-consuming that would be. If each choice led to more choices, my game would branch out like a family tree and develop completely different storylines. I decided to merge my pathways so that the hypertexts I provided were all designed to eventually direct the players to the main plotline and final conclusion. This brings up the question of how much choice players actually get in these games. Many argue that hypertexts allow interactivity and autonomy as readers can choose paths they are interested in. However, the paths are dictated by the writers and have limited choices. This creates an “illusion of control” (Bolter, 2001, pg. 42). When creating educational games, this might be useful since the choices motivate and engage the players, but the educators/designers can still ensure that students are learning what they need to learn and achieving the prescribed learning outcomes.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Five College Digital Humanities. (2016, June 30). How to use Twine to make your own text adventure games! [Video]. YouTube.
Frank, A. (2016, June 20). Crows Crows Crows’ new game is the most fun 10 minutes you’ll have today. Polygon.
The Temple of No. [Twine]. (n.d). Crows Crows Crows.