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Twine Games: Weaving Tapestries of Queer Futurity, there are no bounds to…
Twine Games: Weaving Tapestries of Queer Futurity
A History of Twine Games
Created by Baltimore-based web designer and developer,
Chris Klimas
in 2009
Early Inspirations & Aesthetics (games of the 90s)
Zork
Tiddlywiki
Geocities
WestHollywood
Twine
sites not intentionally queer, but used for queer purposes
Little to No Success Until...
THE TWINE REVOLUTION
(circa 2012)
the platform garners a lot of popularity, especially in feminist and queer online spaces
coincides with the rise of
"empathy games"
nonviolent, often mundane games that try to convey human struggles through rules and virtual spaces
ex. indie games such as "Gone Home"
in contrast to big-budget mainstream games with highly produced worlds that can only be used to explore one set story
Twine thus considered the aesthetic antithesis to mainstream gaming - an anarchist anti-gamer, gamer subgroup
builds a thriving community of creators and readers who use the platform to create and share stories
GAMERGATE
(circa 2015)
Rightwing backlash against Twine and its amplification of queer/trans stories
heightened existing tensions on the platform, revealing a host of issues with the software and culture of aspects of the Twine community
2 more items...
people continued to create and share stories, but started looking elsewhere and for next steps
1 more item...
im sorry, what
is
Twine???
great question!
Twine is a 'Choose Your Own Adventure'-esque hyperlink-based text game
creators can use hyperlinked text passage to build a story - each choice, each click, bringing you to a new passage and branch of the story
creators can use various tools to control the appearance of the text, its duration of screen, and any additional sounds or images to go with the text (added later)
early influential Twine Games
Howling Dogs - Porpentine
Depression Quest - Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, Isaac Schankler
Creatures Such as We - Lynnea Glasser
"Twine helped create a new kind of interactive art - strange, small, lyrical, and often way outside of the world of commercial gaming." -Adi Robertson,
The Verge
Has inspired games since, such as Yarn Spinner
Twine as a Uniquely Trans Space
Because of the financial and technical accessibility of Twine, it is an inherently marginal space, resisting the bounds of capitalism - which monetizes access to education and software
Because Twine is a marginal space, it has the radical potential to imagine futures distinctly outside of/detached from dominant cis-heteronormative structures
"We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world." - bell hooks, "Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness"
Trans Creator, especially Trans Women became some of the most prominent creators on the platform around 2010
Porpentine
"I don’t have time to explain to 1000 people about why I deserve to live and why being trans is beautiful, but I can make 1 game about it that 1000 people play.”
Prominent Games
No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist.
Beautiful Frog
Cry$stal Warrior Ke$ha
since gaining popularity on Twine, has moved into indie game development full time
Anna Anthropy
Prominent Games
Dys4ia
Queers in Love at the End of the World
Mighty Jill Off
Since gaining popularity on Twine, has moved into print media
books
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form
A Game Design Vocabulary
Twine gives its creators total
control
over what their readers experience
"if you can write a story, you can make a Twine Game" - Anna Anthropy
Gives creators creative freedom and the tools to express the complex emotions associated with their identity, without having to put in the emotional labor of having to explain themselves to a cis audience
InterTwined Futures
The Aesthetics of Twine
"liberated simplicity"
there are no bounds to what this can look like
you as Ke$ha battling intergalactic entities that threaten capture your backup dancers and take you on a journey of radical temporality - "Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha"
your final few seconds with your partner at the end of the world - "Queers in Love at the End of the World"
the increasingly difficult tasks of going about your day while depressed - "Depression Quest"
due to the homemade nature of these games, they can cater to niche audiences and explore the unmarketable sides of queerness that would not make it into larger titles
Twine thus has a distinctly queer aesthetic, ones that lends itself to radical queer politics and speculation of post-gender futures
"I suddenly saw a space for myself to do a thing that I'd wanted to since I was a kid. Someone can just make a game like they would make a poem or a sketch… A game that's a sketch. That's really powerful."
Twine as an a path towards financially uplifting Trans creators
Popularity through Twine leading to greater change for upward mobility in other forms of media and storytelling
There has been a gradual decline in the popularity of Twine since the exodus of some of its most prominent creators in 2018
the site is still active and has users, but the software has become dated and is poorly-maintained
Looking Forward: How can we maintain Twine as an accessible place for queer radical politics and futurity?
TECHNOLOGICALLY
transfer Twine from dropbox to an updated housing website
Updating the software to accommodate larger-scale projects
make the platform mobilly accessible
COMMUNITY-WISE
establish a Twine archive to save stories before they become unplayable and to share the works of prominent Twiners
Make Twine games more easily-shareable to other platforms/social media
extend use of Twine from storytelling to resource-sharing and help resources as well
"unleash the rat chaos" - Tom McHenry, Twine Creator
Twine Games drop the reader directly into the story/perspective/timing established by the creator