Twine

Okay, and in more news, Ectocomp, but how much can we say before the games are formally published? Well, Stuart C.

Baker says, working on an informal adaptation of the cask of Amontillado, which seems to have been adapted twice for Twine, but not so far as I can tell in the way I'm adapting it.

So we were going to say we should include It's in the Bacon.

It's not payable online, despite having a playable HTML download, which is a bit odd.

So I went to the university and worked there on the research program for about four years or so.

I want to ask you about the Twine game that you wrote in 2015 with a mutual friend of ours, Tom Bissell, a previous guest on the show.

It was called The Writer Will Do Something, and it was about an emergency meeting on a disastrous fictional AAA sequel.

Tell us a little bit about what the game is and where the idea came from.

I appreciate that.

The book also discusses several different formats, including board games, card games, role-playing games, and choice-based historical texts, created with Twine, that is.

What can these different media and formats contribute to historical learning, and how should educators decide which format is most appropriate for a particular classroom project?

Yeah, it's a great question because every medium represents the past differently, even different media of games.

Um, so what I would say, though, is, um, think about what you want your students most to consider.

A- and this is true if you're designing it for them as well, if you're choosing as a teacher to design, 'cause the book is supposed to do both.

Are you trying to crystallize agency, the choices you make and the reasons why you might make them? If so, Twine, because the precision of text, these are choice-based, right, choose your own adventures, the precision of text allows you to write quite clearly a character and characterize your historical agent.

Um, you know, I always use Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragette, right? And so it's like you get to actually explain why did she choose more aggressive, violent protests in a certain situation rather than more peaceful means.

And then slay the princess has become like a phenomenon in its own right.

And I think it's like such a cool, beautiful story and a, and a nice on-ramp in particular, um, And I think for people looking to get into like a little bit more empathy for the type of bloat we're talking about that can happen when you add branches like Twine and Ren'Py and these like very simple to learn engines like are a great way to visualize it.

Right.

So like for this show, I was like interviewing game devs and I was like, I'll try making a game in Twine to like be able to have more empathy and see.

And it's like when you just, there are like nodes on the screen, right? So you can see the branching pathways.

And when you add one, it's like you double the amount of nodes, right? And so then when you add two, you triple the amount and it's kind of exponential growth as far as work goes.

I did, yeah.

All I just did in HTML and Twine.

So like the sort of initial website you get to is all coded in just HTML.

Very like old school, like you would like a website from the 2000s because that was the like aesthetic I was going for.

And then most everything else was built in Twine, which is a like game engine mainly designed for like choose your own adventure games, like text adventures, right? Um, but if you decide to fuck around with it, you can do other things with it.

Uh, like have passwords and interactive like video segments and stuff, uh, which is what I did with it.

Um, my first time using it, I did like a chooser and adventure game last year as part of an event called slender for gender.

Okay.

And I find out about Twine-

Okay

... and interactive fiction.

I was like, "Fuck, they got me." [chuckles] Because the creative process was incredible.

I, I, I loved solving problems and making this thing exist.

It helped that people liked it, but it spoke to my soul in a way that nothing else did, and a lot of my journey since has been in the same way as figuring out how to make that Twine game.

What do I have? What are the resources I've got? And what is the path to, to shipping a video game?