For my Twine game, I decided to use my own poetry. Instead of creating a traditional game with different choices or endings, I made it so that one poem led into the next. Each poem became its own part of the game, and the hyperlinks allowed the reader to continue moving through my writing. I liked the idea of using something I had already created because it meant I could focus more on figuring out Twine rather than trying to learn the program while also creating entirely new content.
The easiest part of this activity was typing my poetry into Twine. Unfortunately, pretty much everything beyond that became frustrating. I changed the font and background to make the game feel more like my own, but even relatively simple changes felt much more complicated than I expected them to be. I had very little familiarity with the program, and I constantly felt like I was trying to figure out how to make it do something rather than actually focusing on what I was creating. When I couldn’t figure something out, I relied a lot on my classmates for help.
Using hyperlinks with my poetry did make me think differently about how someone can move through a piece of writing. Normally, I think of a poem as something that exists on a page and is read from beginning to end. In Twine, I was able to make separate poems connect to each other. The reader had to interact with the writing to continue, even if their interaction was as simple as clicking into the next poem. In that sense, the format became part of how the writing was experienced.
I wish I could say that discovering this made me love using Twine, but it absolutely did not. I hated making this game. Almost every part of working with the program was frustrating to me, and I didn’t enjoy the process whatsoever. At the same time, I can understand why Twine might be useful for someone who enjoys interactive writing or wants the reader to have more control over how they experience a piece. For me, though, the frustration of figuring out the program distracted me from the part I actually care about, which is the writing itself. If anything, this activity made me appreciate being able to just sit down and write without having to figure out how to make the technology cooperate with me first.
Leave a Reply