UPDATED 23:35 EDT / JANUARY 07 2015

Twine: A tool for creating interactive video game stories for all

book-on-tableThose who have a few years under their belt may still remember “Choose Your Own your adventure”,”SOS” or “Book-Games”. These books consisted of a narrative told through a few paragraphs of story with a decision made by the reader at the end of the section directing readers to flip to a particular page. Each decision led to a potentially different event or plot twist in the story and ultimately to a good or a bad ending.

Introducing Twine: an open-source tool for telling non-linear interactive stories.

Essentially, Twine, originally created by  Chris Klimas in 2009 has gone through many hands by now but is still the best way for non-programmers with an aptitude for writing to hearken back to the olden days of Choose Your Own Adventure.

What is Twine

Twine is a simple, free open-source tool that allows anyone to create adventures with a text editor and connect the segments of the story in a fashion very similar to the adventure books.

Remember the 80’s nonlinear interactive role-playing books? (No? That’s okay.) As a reader, it introduced interactive story choices and depending on which choice you made, the book ​​would require flipping to a specific page to continue the story. This meant that the reader had to stay focused in order not to miss anything and which was also very engaging.

Twine will help you organize and create interactive stories for publishing online.

The result is a hypertext document set produced in HTML with links that accompany the performance of the plot.

Twine creator Klimas exults the tool as a method to better engage readers by providing experiences that  graphical games would struggle to portray. It does so in the same way books can offer vastly different experiences than movies do.

“Twine might have been my graduate thesis, originally, if I had the patience to complete one,” said Klimas. “At the time, I had been experimenting with ways to create hypertext that were strongly code-oriented. I was studying interaction design, so Twine was my attempt to make something that would be friendly to people who were writers more than coders.”

Last year, Twine has gained increasing popularity not only among the beginners but also among many game developer community adopting software for interesting experiments. Some of them are Sacrilege, stories of flirting at a party; What’s in a Name?, sexual identity and mechanisms of exclusion; Conversations With My Mother, a letter from a mother; Howling Dogs, a story within a laboratory; and Broke Down, story about casinos and gunshots.

How it works

This free program runs on Mac and PC that allows anyone to write and publish multiple choice history. The interest here is for the reader to follow his own path in a more or less long plot as long as it is consistent. The final result of the experience puts the player in front of a text to read, interpret and follow according to his own judgment.

As the software uses basic HTML, it is as simple to capture the text to format and and stick to the story told. It is also possible to add images, sound, music and even videos; enough to make each more complex and immersive story to the reader. Finally, the story is built on many web pages, the author can change any element of infinite possibilities and experience of great wealth.

“It’s absolutely true that you can create a story with Twine without writing any code at all –I don’t consider the markup used to create links or italicize words to be code, though I understand some would.” Klimas notes. “But I think it’s equally true that moving from a codeless story to one that, say, has a little conditional logic is painless. You can add it when you’re ready, and you can dive into as deeply as you like, even to the point where you are writing your own JavaScript to extend the runtime itself.”

The developer further added that going browser-based also makes it much easier to get Twine onto other platforms. Linux is now a first-class citizen in Twineland, and there’s now support for writing Twine stories on a tablet, whether it’s running iOS, Android, or something stranger.

leafs-of-a-bookThe games

One of the most famous authors of a Twine-based game is Porpentine, who has also placed many tutorials on the web.

One of the most critically acclaimed Twine games created by Porpentine has been Howling Dogs. The game is about a woman named Porpentine and her journey about trauma and escapism. A selection of other noteworthy games by the same author are “All I Want Is for All of My Friends to Become Insanely Powerful”, “Begscape”, “Ultra Business Tycoon III”, and “With Those We Love Alive”.

Take for example Mainichi (which in Japanese means “every day”) autobiographical by Mattie Brice. Here the player plays the role of a small female character who wakes up in the morning and gets ready for a coffee with a friend in a nearby bar. But life isn’t that simple–simply walking down the street, on the way home from the bar, this seemingly effortless task becomes dotted with interruptions that must be overcome by the player.

Another game developed by the Anna Anthropy is Dys4ia (“dysphoria”, emotional condition linked to gender identity disorder), which takes the player to live the experience of a transgender undergoing hormone therapy replacement. The title, done in Flash and consists of a series of mini-games, the player moves through the emotions and insecurities that the same Anthropy tried during the period of his treatment–frustration, anger and finally hope. Dys4ia is an emotional story and vulnerable, whose greatest talents are donating the player a strong level of empathy and being able to help other people queer crossing the same obstacles.

To get an idea of the interactive possibilities of this tool, go and see details on TwineHub. In addition, here is the link to download it: http://www.gimcrackd.com/etc/src/.

If you want to deepen, Porpentine – developer of games and co-curator of the webzine FreeIndieGam.es has gathered all the resources for Twine, including an excellent guide created by Anna Anthropy.

photo credit: Nefi via photopin cc; photo credit: Wouter de Bruijn via photopin cc

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