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   Twine
   September 10, 2022
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   Written on my laptop, while waiting for
   shit to hit the fan
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  I just recently read a tweet about Twine (https://twinery.org/)
  which immediately brought me back to just a bit more than one year
  ago, when I installed it on my kids' laptop and immediately started
  playing with it.
  
  Twine is "an open source tool which allows you to write interactive
  nonlinear stories". Remember those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books
  you used to play with as a kid? Well, think about that on steroids,
  with a beautiful UI to show the "map" of your story's passages, a
  markdown editor for text, the possibility to add different media
  types, and output to a single html file which can be immediately
  played online on different devices.
  
  My then 7yo kid started writing his own stories and I enjoyed both
  playing with them and creating some on my own (with the excuse of
  testing its limits...). I realised this is a very good environment
  to nurture creativity, because:
  
  - it makes the part of creating the adventure super-easy, so you
    can actually focus on its contents... And if you are reading this
    post via gopher I think you can easily relate with this ;-)
  
  - some of its extensions make it more powerful than I originally
    expected, i.e. thanks to the use of variables you can build an
    inventory and/or player stats, and with user inputs you can ask
    for e.g. passwords... Too bad they are stored in clear in the
    html, but hey, if you want to play THAT way then it is a whole
    different story!
  
  - for the two reasons above, in addition to creating and playing,
    you can also learn a little bit of programming but that can be
    introduced gradually and with plenty of support (e.g. I found
    the Twine Cookbook [1] super useful)
  
  Well... Needless to say I was hooked, and I did not just write one
  small adventure for my kid's 8th birthday [2], but also decided to
  give a Tiny Talk (a short, 20' informal presentation at work) about 
  this. 
  
  While doing some research for the talk, I realised that something 
  people don't say when just presenting Twine "as a tool" is that 
  there is a very interesting community behind it. One devoted to 
  Interactive Fiction (IF) in its many forms, and producing it with 
  different tools. Interactive Fiction has it roots in old textual 
  adventure games such as "Colossal Cave Adventure" (1975). If you 
  don't know much about it (or if you know and want to live again
  that magic period), I suggest you to check out "Get Lamp", Jason
  Scott's documentary about IF and the influence it had on the games
  that came after [3,4,5]. Also, Netflix "High Score" series has an
  episode (S1E3, "Role Players") at least partly devoted to this.
  
  Ok, as often in my life, a rabbit (gopher?) hole that leads to
  another one then to another one... Still, I hope worth sharing!
  
  
  
  [1] https://twinery.org/cookbook/
  [2] http://federico.eynard.it/8years.html
  [3] http://www.getlamp.com/
  [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU
  [5] https://archive.org/details/getlamp-interviews