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?