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1. Unraveling Twine: Open Platforms and the Future of Hypertextual Literature

   As the technical affordances that shaped early electronic literature’s frontiers have become commonplace, hypertextual structures abound in our experiences of online texts. Many tools make it easier than ever to generate these types of works, but one of the most interesting for its demonstrated literary potential is Twine: a platform for building choice-driven stories easily publishable on the web without relying heavily on code. In software studies, a platform is defined by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort as a hardware or software system that provides the “foundation of computational expression.” This definition can encompass any of the tools we use to develop procedural content, as Bogost noted on his blog: “a platform…is something that supports programming and programs, the creation and execution of computational media.” Examining Twine as a case-study among current open, non-coder friendly platforms probes the future of interactive narrative on the web—a future that, outside the traditional scope of the electronic literature community, is highly determined by the affordances of platforms and the desires of their user-developers.

   Thor Baukhol Madsen - 19.02.2015 - 15:42

2. A Stitch in Twine: Platform Studies and Porting Patchwork Girl

   This presentation asks what we can learn about a foundational work of electronic literature – Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – by porting it to a new platform. More than this, it asks what we can learn about the source and target platforms of such a porting exercise.

   Hannah Ackermans - 13.11.2015 - 13:23

3. Ephemeral Words, Ephemeral People: Suicide and Choice in Twine Games

   On April 10th, 2014, game designer Porpentine released a game called Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone with the intention of deleting it at the end of the day: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. You can download it here until then. What you do with it, whether you distribute, share, or cover it, is up to you.” The game has lived on through what Porpentine predicted as “social means,” but it was designed as an ephemeral text, and one which the author deliberately destroyed as part of the act of creation. This idea of a vanishing text is interwoven with the experience of electronic literature, as Marjorie C. Luesebrink notes, as part of a practice of “text erasure” as embracing “self-undermining, undecidability, disdain for commercialization, ambivalence about technology, struggle against the presence of text itself, and response to overwhelming data” but also “the fragility of memory” (2014).

   Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 14:52

4. Intimate Mechanics: One Model of Electronic Literature

   Intimate Mechanics: One Model of Electronic Literature

   Alvaro Seica - 10.06.2016 - 19:32

5. Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation

   Behind the fluorescent veil of modern big-business video games, a quiet revolution is happening, and it’s centered on a tool called Twine. Taken up by nontraditional game authors to describe distinctly nontraditional subjects—from struggles with depression, explorations of queer identity, and analyses of the world of modern sex and dating to visions of breeding crustacean horses in a dystopian future—the Twine movement to date has created space for those who have previously been voiceless within games culture to tell their own stories, as well as to invent new visions outside of traditional channels of commerce. Videogames for Humans, curated and introduced by Twine author and games theorist merritt kopas, puts Twine authors, literary writers, and games critics into conversation with one another’s work, reacting to, elaborating on, and being affected by the same. The result is an unprecedented kind of book about video games, one that will jump-start the discussions that will define the games culture of tomorrow.

   Alvaro Seica - 10.06.2016 - 19:57

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Hypertext: Storyspace to Twine

    "This chapter examines the transformations of literary hypertext as a nonlinear digital writing format and practice since its inception in the late 1980s. We trace its development from the editorially closed and demographically exclusive writerly practices associated with first generation hypertext (also known as the Storyspace School) to the participatory, inclusive, and arguably more democratic affordances of the freely accessible, userfriendly online writing tool Twine. We argue that while this evolution, alongside other participatory forms of social media writing, has brought creative media practices closer than ever to the early poststructuralist-inspired theory of “wreadership” (Landow 1992), the discourses and practices surrounding Twine perpetuate ideological and commercially reinforced binaries between literature and gameplay.

    Carlos Muñoz - 19.09.2018 - 15:25

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