nickfourtimes's review
5.0
1) [Introduction]
"Late 2012 and early 2013 was an extraordinarily exciting period for me: I started, for the first time, to feel like I was a part of something. The 'queer games scene' covered by videogame outlets might not have been as cohesive as some accounts supposed, but for a little under a year, it definitely felt real. We were telling new stories in new ways, stories that were not just unheard of as subjects for videogames—which they certainly were—but rare in any medium. We were writing about messy lives on the economic and social margins of society, about the complexities of embodiment and community, about our grotesque cyberpunk dreams and gay pulp fantasies.
Things fell apart, as they often do in tightly knit, passionate communities of artistic people with few resources—especially when those people are all also friends, lovers, or something in between. But that period was intensely generative, launching a number of authors into visibility and recognition and solidifying the reputations of others. When the burst of activity around Twine during this time ended, it didn't just fizzle out—it left marks on literary and independent videogames communities.
Twine games ended up on college syllabi, technical resources piled up for those wanting to play with variations on the form, and even the relatively small amount of journalistic and critical attention paid to some prominent Twine works raised the profile of the tool to a new level. When Richard Hofmeier—winner of the 2013 Independent Game Festival's grand prize award for his game Cart Life—defaced his own booth and replaced his game's demo with Twine author Porpentine's well-received game Howling Dogs, it became impossible to ignore the importance of Twine to independent games."
2) [scarfmemory by Michael Brough, played by Anna Anthropy]
"'bus reaches the stop finally. better take all your stuff.
take: hat gloves scarf backpack bag of food
okay lets go'
all of the items here are links, big blue letters, except for 'scarf,' which sits between them, small and white and naked, unclickable. this is storytelling right here, just through how the text is labelled.
in older, puzzle-focused text games, the player develops a sort of instinct of, upon reaching a new place, immediately grabbing everything that's not nailed down and taking it with you: you never know when you might need that hairpin to pick the lock on a treasure chest. at this point, you want to alter history, i want to make michael take his scarf, but my inability to is already a forgone conclusion. i wonder how many times michael played out this scene in his head, willing himself, in memory, to just take the scarf. the player's doing the same thing, right now.
there's a photo of a pile of stuff on the desk: michael's coat, michael's gloves. his scarf can be seen, orange and blue, in the pile.
when i click on something to take, its name vanishes from the screen, ultimately leaving the word 'scarf' behind, untakeable, alone.
'> hat
> gloves
> backpack
> bag of food
> okay let's go
you're sitting on a different bus, in a different time and place.
how much of life is spent moving from one place to another?
> how much of life
it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be wasted time, you can read a book, knit something, think deeply, look out at the view, talk to friends.
maybe in the future these things will have internet connections too!'
clicking on 'knit' draws me through an entire internal dialogue, as michael goes back and forth about whether he should learn to knit. this game is all about transitions: michael knits his scarf as a way to deal with travel, he loses his scarf while travelling. a scarf is a transitional piece of clothing: you wear it when you're between places, because it's too warm to wear it inside. for michael, his scarf is a way in which he takes ownership of the time of his life he spends out of control of it—the time he spends travelling. but travelling, ultimately, takes it back."
3) [Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn, played by Toni Pizza]
"'You open your front door and stare at your apartment. An overwhelming feeling of exhaustion overcomes you, and you feel like your energy levels are low enough that you'll likely settle into a single activity tonight.
What do you do?
1: Just shake off your bad mood and do something fun for the rest of the evening.
2. Reach out to someone close to you.
3: Don't burden anyone with your problems. Distract yourself.'
Fine, I'll take the only choice that is there.
'> Don't burden anyone
What you really want more than anything is to turn your brain off and just disappear for a while. You sink resignedly into your couch and start playing videogames, but you can't seem to focus on what's happening on-screen. You cycle through a few different games, but tonight everything seems either too tedious or too aggravating for you to play for more than a few minutes. A few of your online friends invite you to play a game with them, but the prospect of having to talk, let alone cooperate with other people seems incredibly unpleasant. You decide to give the videogames a rest for the evening, though you worry that you've offended your online friends and your next conversation will be awkward because of it, giving you yet another source of stress to weigh down on you tonight.'"
4) [I'm Fine by Rokashi Edwards, played by John Brindle]
"The best illustration of this writing is also most telling difference between these games. [Depression Quest] begins with a lengthy paratext setting out, with trigger warnings and links to mental health resources, its aims, its content, and its omissions. The writers explain that they have amalgamated the real experiences of 'several people' and tried to include 'as broad a range as possible.' They're careful to qualify the game's relation to reality, saying that it won't reflect everyone's perspective. They also say that they want to help people who don't have depression understand what it's like. This comes across in the writing, which works to order and express the counter-intuitive spirals of depression in a way which can be understood from outside them.
I'm Fine does not come off like an amalgamation. It's aggressively specific, locked into the mind of one person. It isn't committed to a representative paradigm and doesn't show any interest in 'hitting the key points.' It doesn't really care about being accessible to muggles, either; it's not trying to translate. It is what it is, it jumps right in, and it comes on as thick and strong and bleak as difficult as a person might in the thick of this shit. I'm not passing judgement on the artistic goals of either of these games, because both have their reasons to be. But the contrast between how hard DQ works to be polished and accessible, and how hostile and uncompromising I found my first try of I'm Fine, could not be more instructive. This is a game which fully inhabits its topic. It remains 'inside,' trapped in the loops, and there's no way to do that without being alienating for some."
"Late 2012 and early 2013 was an extraordinarily exciting period for me: I started, for the first time, to feel like I was a part of something. The 'queer games scene' covered by videogame outlets might not have been as cohesive as some accounts supposed, but for a little under a year, it definitely felt real. We were telling new stories in new ways, stories that were not just unheard of as subjects for videogames—which they certainly were—but rare in any medium. We were writing about messy lives on the economic and social margins of society, about the complexities of embodiment and community, about our grotesque cyberpunk dreams and gay pulp fantasies.
Things fell apart, as they often do in tightly knit, passionate communities of artistic people with few resources—especially when those people are all also friends, lovers, or something in between. But that period was intensely generative, launching a number of authors into visibility and recognition and solidifying the reputations of others. When the burst of activity around Twine during this time ended, it didn't just fizzle out—it left marks on literary and independent videogames communities.
Twine games ended up on college syllabi, technical resources piled up for those wanting to play with variations on the form, and even the relatively small amount of journalistic and critical attention paid to some prominent Twine works raised the profile of the tool to a new level. When Richard Hofmeier—winner of the 2013 Independent Game Festival's grand prize award for his game Cart Life—defaced his own booth and replaced his game's demo with Twine author Porpentine's well-received game Howling Dogs, it became impossible to ignore the importance of Twine to independent games."
2) [scarfmemory by Michael Brough, played by Anna Anthropy]
"'bus reaches the stop finally. better take all your stuff.
take: hat gloves scarf backpack bag of food
okay lets go'
all of the items here are links, big blue letters, except for 'scarf,' which sits between them, small and white and naked, unclickable. this is storytelling right here, just through how the text is labelled.
in older, puzzle-focused text games, the player develops a sort of instinct of, upon reaching a new place, immediately grabbing everything that's not nailed down and taking it with you: you never know when you might need that hairpin to pick the lock on a treasure chest. at this point, you want to alter history, i want to make michael take his scarf, but my inability to is already a forgone conclusion. i wonder how many times michael played out this scene in his head, willing himself, in memory, to just take the scarf. the player's doing the same thing, right now.
there's a photo of a pile of stuff on the desk: michael's coat, michael's gloves. his scarf can be seen, orange and blue, in the pile.
when i click on something to take, its name vanishes from the screen, ultimately leaving the word 'scarf' behind, untakeable, alone.
'> hat
> gloves
> backpack
> bag of food
> okay let's go
you're sitting on a different bus, in a different time and place.
how much of life is spent moving from one place to another?
> how much of life
it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be wasted time, you can read a book, knit something, think deeply, look out at the view, talk to friends.
maybe in the future these things will have internet connections too!'
clicking on 'knit' draws me through an entire internal dialogue, as michael goes back and forth about whether he should learn to knit. this game is all about transitions: michael knits his scarf as a way to deal with travel, he loses his scarf while travelling. a scarf is a transitional piece of clothing: you wear it when you're between places, because it's too warm to wear it inside. for michael, his scarf is a way in which he takes ownership of the time of his life he spends out of control of it—the time he spends travelling. but travelling, ultimately, takes it back."
3) [Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn, played by Toni Pizza]
"'You open your front door and stare at your apartment. An overwhelming feeling of exhaustion overcomes you, and you feel like your energy levels are low enough that you'll likely settle into a single activity tonight.
What do you do?
2. Reach out to someone close to you.
3: Don't burden anyone with your problems. Distract yourself.'
Fine, I'll take the only choice that is there.
'> Don't burden anyone
What you really want more than anything is to turn your brain off and just disappear for a while. You sink resignedly into your couch and start playing videogames, but you can't seem to focus on what's happening on-screen. You cycle through a few different games, but tonight everything seems either too tedious or too aggravating for you to play for more than a few minutes. A few of your online friends invite you to play a game with them, but the prospect of having to talk, let alone cooperate with other people seems incredibly unpleasant. You decide to give the videogames a rest for the evening, though you worry that you've offended your online friends and your next conversation will be awkward because of it, giving you yet another source of stress to weigh down on you tonight.'"
4) [I'm Fine by Rokashi Edwards, played by John Brindle]
"The best illustration of this writing is also most telling difference between these games. [Depression Quest] begins with a lengthy paratext setting out, with trigger warnings and links to mental health resources, its aims, its content, and its omissions. The writers explain that they have amalgamated the real experiences of 'several people' and tried to include 'as broad a range as possible.' They're careful to qualify the game's relation to reality, saying that it won't reflect everyone's perspective. They also say that they want to help people who don't have depression understand what it's like. This comes across in the writing, which works to order and express the counter-intuitive spirals of depression in a way which can be understood from outside them.
I'm Fine does not come off like an amalgamation. It's aggressively specific, locked into the mind of one person. It isn't committed to a representative paradigm and doesn't show any interest in 'hitting the key points.' It doesn't really care about being accessible to muggles, either; it's not trying to translate. It is what it is, it jumps right in, and it comes on as thick and strong and bleak as difficult as a person might in the thick of this shit. I'm not passing judgement on the artistic goals of either of these games, because both have their reasons to be. But the contrast between how hard DQ works to be polished and accessible, and how hostile and uncompromising I found my first try of I'm Fine, could not be more instructive. This is a game which fully inhabits its topic. It remains 'inside,' trapped in the loops, and there's no way to do that without being alienating for some."
deejsylvis's review
4.0
A really great way to acquaint yourself with what's being done in Twine games - a series of combination playthrough/essays that allow you to see the text from the games themselves, as well as someone's thoughts and experiences while playing. What the book showcases most of all is the personal side to these creations, and the relationship that emerges between the writer and player each time - things that you see far less often with big commercial gaming. Highly recommended if you're interested in text adventures, and absolutely necessary if you want to write them.
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