Twine

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Synonyms:
See also: Inform, Interactive fiction, bitsy, Ren'Py, Wiki,
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Twine is a free tool for creating text-based games that use branching storytelling. It is designed for usability and can be used by people with no prior experience in programming or HTML. A twine story compiles into a single HTML file. Twine is popular in fandom as a medium for creating interactive fanfiction and/or fangames.

Anna Anthropy has written extensively about twine, with an emphasis on how it provides a medium for voices that are marginalized within the mainstream gaming community.[1]

Precursors

Twine is sometimes viewed as being a modern descendant of old-school web 1.0, namely GeoCities, LiveJournal, and MySpace. Twine works often have a similar design to old fansites, including hyperlinking, simple HTML, abundance of CSS and flashy graphics. The design and stories told on them are often of a personal nature. This combined with a prominent queer userbase, has led to comparisons with fan culture.

The appeal of Twine is the appeal of a GeoCities neighborhood (my first virtual “home” was in Area 51—for those unfamiliar, that was once the designated space for science fiction fandom and home to many writers of another important form of electronic literature—fan fiction). My GeoCities site was populated by animated GIFs “adopted” from online artists, webrings links to other preteens and teenagers with rambling, and confessional web pages filled with fandom, and most of my early writing (such as it was) was done in the collaborative, free-form space of a role-playing chatroom in my first fandom. (Which fandom is irrelevant and omitted here for self-preservation. OK, it was Mummies Alive!) Thankfully, any and all record of this appears to have been erased by the death of the old-school web (reader: do not view this as a challenge, please). These websites gave birth to the similarly aesthetically challenged chaos of MySpace, which similarly featured the web-1.0 look of clashing backgrounds, bad animation, and lots of flashing and moving parts[2]

By contrast, Facebook is boring, uniform, and tiresome, with a panopticon of profiles, all the same and algorithmically monitored. Interactive fiction constructed in parsers has always felt similarly off-putting to me—colorless and gray. Inform 7 has the cookie-cutter visual look of corporate web 2.0, despite its decidedly rebellious lineage. Twine, on the other hand, is the discordant, frequently visually dissonant development tool that seems to have grown up on GeoCities, MySpace, and LiveJournal[2]

But back to GeoCities: when I was happily linking my site to others through webrings and banner exchanges, I was not particularly aware that hypertextual narratives were a thing (or even a thing other people did), and that is something I suspect I have in common with many of the writer/designers who discovered Twine. On reflection, I was participating in their ilk—the interwoven narratives of self-inserted characters appearing and reappearing in fan fiction traded and rewritten had its moments. While I was generationally of the right age to grow up on graphic adventure games and a few text-game holdovers, I would not discover hypertext fictions and electronic literature until a college class directed me to the appropriate corners of the web and required the purchase of an Eastgate CD that didn’t want to run even then. That disk, Deena Larsen’s beautiful work Samplers (1996),[3] is still on my shelf for posterity’s sake alongside many other unplayable pieces. As a platform, Eastgate’s Storyspace was immediately off-putting to me: anything that can’t be shared freely online or found in a computer software store seemed to me (raised on fan fiction) inaccessible. Hypertext fictions seemed better-suited to thrive when made open on the web and lived alongside GeoCities in nineties venues, including New River, Postmodern Culture, and Iowa Review.[4]

Examples

Fanworks

Most Twine works are original fiction, but a number of interactive fanfiction and fangames exist, including:

Friends at the Table

A number of fangames for the podcast Friends at the Table have been made in Twine. This is one of the few fandoms that consistently make Twine works, likely due to the Secret Samol fanworks exchange. Some of these include:

Professional writers

Twine was also used by writer Charlie Brooker in the development of the Netflix's interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.[5]

Meta

Resources

References

  1. ^ "The power of Twine". polygon.com. February 2, 2017. Retrieved April 17, 2018.
  2. ^ a b Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives, by Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop (2021), Chapter 2-T2, pg. 79-80
  3. ^ "Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts". Eastgate Systems, Inc. Archived from the original on 1998-04-15.
  4. ^ Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop. "Project MUSE - Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives". Archived from the original on 2024-06-10.
  5. ^ Reynolds, Matt (December 28, 2018). "The inside story of Bandersnatch, the weirdest Black Mirror tale yet". Wired UK.
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