PLANNING YOUR TWINE GAME

Writing multilinear or multivocal stories can take a bit of practice – drafting out (either on paper or within twine itself) the plot, objects, interactions and flow of the story can go a long way to making sure you don’t get sucked down into a bottomless trench. When starting out it is often best to constrain the number of pathways that can be taken as more pathways and more choices will exponentially increase the amount of writing that you will need to do! It is also good to remember that many of the things that you initially want to do by creating new passages can equally be served by some clever conditional formatting or variable tracking so planning in advance can save valuable time – recognizing where you can use these and how they can be effectively implemented takes time and practice. Starting small and practicing often is the easiest way to get proficient at creating stories.

With regards to creating archaeologically focussed or stories occurring in the past: starting in a focused area, for example, taking one well established narrative and expanding it to include additional perspectives, what if scenarios or facilitating player input is often a good place to start. Other examples of good starter projects might be to identify one artefact and explore the different stories that surround it, or one thematic area and provide several pathways to explore that theme. Creating stories and games about the past in Twine can be a lot of fun, but it can also be incredibly challenging. Writing in a multilinear or multivocal way is not entirely normative to how we conduct our research. To this end it can be an incredibly valuable tool, pushing you outside of your comfort zone to explore the past in different ways. The more you plan and prototype and create the better you will become at thinking in this way and the more readily you will be able to think about different ways of talking about the past.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by this, but if you plan ahead, start small and work from areas of the past which you are familiar with to start with the technical side of writing (and if you are so inclined – coding) in this way it can be a reflexive and rewarding experience.