#to do something more than a glorified script in the format of a novel. and you can say 'oh you're being mean maybe they're just new to that

[icedille]

one of my toxic traits is that i can't stand writers as a class of people WITH THE EXCEPTION OF A FEW ONES ok some of them are also the loves of my life but. they're crucially a minority so apart from those they're all SO annoying to me. and the fact that i'm also one doesn't help. anyway if you're a writer and i don't know you personally you should die

[canmom]

Do you have any reflections on twine games? I feel the best ended up limited to having glorified page turn buttons, but it was such a accessible format!

honestly i could take or leave twine these days.

the best twines were always charity's, and i have a great deal of anger still for what the others in that little 'community' put her through. but her stuff was great less because of the virtue of the format itself, and more because she's a truly incredible writer, who excels in just about whatever medium she chooses :p

the virtue of twine, at least for me, is perhaps that it pushes you towards short, punchy paragraphs with an enforced break between them, which helps create a particular rhythmic cadence without quite becoming poetry. (charity used physical page turns to similar effect in PNE). Twine also does allow you to implement multiple 'routes', much like a visual novel, with the possibilities that allows: a narrative where the different branches reflect on each other and lend to each others' interpretation. (Vesp for example does this very well).

But that's more virtues of hypertext; as for the tool itself, I feel like it had a weird habit of trying to reinvent the wheel and create new scripting languages that compile to javascript. So before long I settled on the theme that just gives you markdown and JS directly, and swapped out the twine editor for Twee2 or TweeGo or something like that.

I haven't really kept up with the modern Twine scene (or its successors as 'accessible web game tool' like Bitsy). my feeling is that as soon as you start trying to do something more complicated than a basic branching narrative with a few user-set variables, the format becomes more of a limitation than an aid. the pre-set styles are useful at least for a jumping off point!

as far as its potential to make game dev more 'accessible', to a new community or w/e, that kind of didn't happen :p a particular scene of mostly (but not all) trans women adopted it for a while, then a few of them used that as a sacrificial springboard to launch banal podcasting careers or whatever; a few people on the fringes carried on using it, but "very online, mostly white trans girls and their friends" have found many other things to fixate on in the years since, and nobody else really picked it up :p

i think like, if someone is drawn to "make games" as a hobby, they typically don't really have hypertext fiction in mind, so it's never going to get a lot of attention on that basis. bitsy gets us a little closer. but the truth is people will teach themselves quite complicated authoring tools, such as Flash, if there is a supportive community to teach them and some striking examples to show what's possible. Flash may be gone, but we're gradually seeing that kind of 'flourishing' again with the explosion of free game engines like Unity and Godot - though there's so much more financial pressure now to sell games than there was in the days of newgrounds.

i also think the 'accessibility' brings with it kind of a limitation: Twine hides all the inner workings so it's kind of a closed off system that's hard to tinker with without rebuilding it from scratch. sure it's very easy to make a branching path story and put it on the web, maybe use some premade widgets like rotating links, but if you want to customise it visually or create game logic, you either learn a one of several very specific scripting languages that are like, not really useful for anything outside of that one twine theme and typically have a lot of restrictions compared to 'real' javascript... or else you basically learn webdev anyway in a difficult, non-self-explanatory way. (like, it's kind of hacky that you have to put CSS in a special story passage). at best it could be an impetus for some people to start learning webdev concepts?

that said, I really do treasure some of the corpus of twines. Charity's obviously, but there was also this very fun tf porn one called 'horse world' which is now only available on archive.org. (not to be confused with 'horse master', which was also pretty great). the best part of the twine scene was the basic idea of writing weird horny experimental scifi about gay trauma or w/e, which has nothing to do with it being interactive fiction or particular authoring tools!

i don't regret using it for my early experiments in web fiction like house and hacker, even though they're not remotely "interactive". if the scene had been less... *waves hands* like that, maybe it could have been more than a passing fad. but that's the way it is, I don't think I'm likely to use it again next time I make something in the interactive fiction - visual novel space. (which might be sooner than you think~)