Tag Archives: Anna Anthropy

Digital Academics

Hello Twine!

 I am EXTREMELY (yes, I just used caps, bold, italic, underline, comic sans, and purple on an adverb to express my excitement…English majors and designers, please avert your eyes) excited about giving Twine a try. First off, Anna Anthropy should write all how-to’s ever. I loved her introduction to Twine and I felt like it opened my eyes to some potential features and ideas to experiment with using this great tool, and also let me feel like I could hit the ground running without worrying about the technical stuff too much.

Last week I mentioned writing choose your own adventure stories in QBASIC when I was a teenager. This program essentially gives you the same ability and does so in a far more user friendly way. The ability to create the story and then manipulate the markup, css, and javascript makes Twine a very robust platform and I fear that there is not going to be enough time in this class for me to really get as much out of it as I hope to.

I have had time to read a couple examples that Anna Anthropy points us toward at the end of her article. I adore You Will Select a Decision, published by Brendan Patrick Hennessy. I only had time to play with №1 – Small Child In Woods, and I managed to kill the poor child within 4 steps of the story, but the narrative is fantastic, and the history of it being banned by the CIA due to fears involving a communist plot to control the minds of American children is great as well.

I can not stress how excited I am to use this software for this class, and I will try and post a quick test before our Google Hangout tomorrow evening. Do any of you have ideas that you want to try in the Twine format yet?

 

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Digital Academics

Reactions to “And the Robot Horse You Rode In On” & “Party At Woodside”

 Oh! I love A Party in Woodside by Judy Malloy. A friend of mine and myself spent some time trying to create “choose your own adventure” stories in QBASIC when I was in junior high and as underclassmen in high school. My friends and I all spent a great deal of time online playing text based adventure games, which share some similarities to these stories as well. I really enjoy what Judy Malloy has done here. I love the parallel narratives that are taking place. I followed Jenny and Uncle Roger through the story. It was interesting how clicking on one and then back to the other would result in you either making leaps forward or back in time in relation to the other. The whole experience really gave a temporal and connected feel to the experience and I am afraid I am hooked. I am also planning on going to my father’s house this week to see if I can find any of the old 5.25” discs that we saved our adventure books to. If I can, I will try and compile them and share them here on the blog.

I also enjoyed And the Robot Horse You Rode In On by Anna Anthropy as well. I think that this is a great example of an evolution beyond the concept of Malloy’s work, though I feel as though there is a strength in the search terms listed at the bottom of the work in Malloy’s piece. I like that I can double back and see the event from the perspective of another character and then, using the back navigation button on my browser, go back to the original character’s point of view in a more understandable fashion. That said, the “new Wild West” environment and characters in Anthropy’s story are fascinating and I will be revisiting this piece in the future.

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