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1. Narratologize it, Don’t Criticize it: feat. With Those We Love Alive

   There is a moment in Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive (2014) when we must choose whether to join a murderous mob (albeit one murdering soft, pink, kitten-like “princess spores” that have spawned from a Skull Empress). It serves as a prompt to read digital narratives of choice – often, binary ones – in light of the intensely binarized socio-political moment more broadly.

   Amirah Mahomed - 05.09.2018 - 15:13

2. There’s An Other Gap in Play

   Twine’s accessibility and ease of use have allowed more people to write and develop videogames. Merritt Kopas writes in Videogames for Humans: “Twine’s financial and technical accessibility are major reasons for its broad adoption, especially among economically marginalized, nontraditional game designers...” (10). These ‘nontraditional game designers’ have produced an influx of narrative and gaming content, and, as Stuart Moulthrop notes, despite the fact that Twine games can be seen “as an evolution from literary hypertext in the late 1980s,” many in the Twine community insist they develop games, not electronic literature (2016). This defiance should not go unnoticed, as Moulthrop asserts: “This resistance is important... Their return to the story/game problem implies a working- through of earlier issues, if not clear dialectical progress. Their willing embrace of the ludic also signifies an ability to stand among and against hegemonic interests like the videogame industry” (2016).

   Amirah Mahomed - 05.09.2018 - 15:26

3. Unheard Music: Twine and Its Priority

   When he created Twine, Kris Klimas apparently did not think he was building a hypertext platform, rather an intervention into the broader, perhaps distinct tradition of interactive fiction. By 2009 the hypertext moment may have completely passed, leaving Twine within a different dispensation. Reinforcing this impression, some prominent Twine users have disclaimed any links between their work and that of earlier digital writers, notably the Storyspace contingent, decrying their elders’ commercial publishing model and noting that pay barriers have made turn-of-the-century work inaccessible to them. In thinking about how Twine fits into software culture, we thus face a continuity gap. In technical and (perhaps more arguably) aesthetic dimensions, Twine inherits from and extends the hypertextual experiment; yet there are no formal or institutional connections. Twine works may be in some respects a second coming of hypertext fiction (and many other things as well), but without awareness of prior art.

   Amirah Mahomed - 05.09.2018 - 15:38

4. Fight Like a Girl: Digital Storytelling For Self-Motivation Strategies Used By Women Athletes in Muay Thai

   This short paper is an excerpt from my major research project, a knowledge translation project which seeks to create an accessible interactive fiction piece to teach self-motivation strategies utilized by women athletes. This project consists of an interdisciplinary literature review and interviews focused on how women self-motivate as amateur athletes in Muay Thai. This data will then be used in a knowledge translation project involving a game creation, including writing a script for the game based on the interviews to encompass a "typical" woman fighter in Muay Thai, inputting this script into the Twine program to generate a playable game, and doing a quality assurance roll out to ensure the game works in its technical aspects. 

   This paper focuses on audience and accessibility, and how new media storytelling can be a pedagogical tool as well as entertainment. By using a narrative, arts-based approach as the framework, the goal of the project is to communicate with consumers on an emotional level in a meaningful way. 

   Amirah Mahomed - 19.09.2018 - 14:13

5. An Atlas of Hypertext: Gaps in the Maps

   This paper reports on an the initial stages of compiling a comprehensive, historically deep "atlas" of the structures of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and Twine games. In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io. What do we find when we consider these forms of electronic literature (and their crucial precurors) as one comprehensive atlas of a vast transmedia territory of interactive storytelling? Which methods may be adapted between print and digital works, and which demand new approaches?

   Akvile Sinkeviciute - 03.10.2018 - 15:16