SCREEN WRITING
There’s been lots of talk about how the internet is changing the way we read, but little talk about how it’s changing the way we write. So a recent Times Magazine article about the video game platform Twine strikes a chord. Like other video games, Twine games are immersive, shaping participatory narratives that stir up real-life emotions. But Twine games are entirely text-based, so they are also a (new) kind of literature.
The software has a deliberately unsophisticated feeling: most games are composed with a single font style, on a single-color background, with no more than a single paragraph on each screen, and in language punctuated very loosely, in the manner of text messages. Playing a Twine game requires less focus than reading a novel and more decision-making. One moves from screen to screen by selecting between different highlighted passages of text, which gives the story a strong sense of linearity, and cause and effect. These are qualities that are appealing, and that aren’t always served up in literary fiction. Though if one plays the same game more than once, one finds recurring routes and brushes up against the limits of the narrative.
Like the graphics, the writing in Twine games is deliberately unsophisticated. In Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner, Porpentine, one of the platform’s most celebrated authors, depicts a critical early-morning conversation between two lovers. The game is written entirely as dialogue, without any clear indication of historical time and place, and with few physical descriptions. An early screen that alludes to physical devastation (asking the player to choose between asteroids, a plague, and bombs), and soft country-inflected music playing in the background, are all that set the scene. The game is entirely gender-neutral, and we know nothing about the two characters except that one is called Sam. It lasts only about two minutes, yet at its conclusion the fate of the relationship is settled, convincingly and often sadly.
Twine is simple to use; basic commands can be learned in about five minutes. It’s free, and programers typically distribute their games through sites that are also free. The software’s genre-busting potential is amazing. Twine calls those who aren’t particularly artsy, or articulate, to write stories. And it calls those who aren’t tech-savvy, or escapist, to play video games.
Screenshot from Breakfast on a Wagon with your Partner, by Porpentine.
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