Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories
twinery.org
twinery.org
It's interesting that the Twine website seems to actively avoid calling them IF or text adventures or games, and prefers "stories" instead. Maybe the community feels that those labels are too limiting. (I haven't played any contemporary IF or any Twine experiences, so just observing as an outsider.)
Not necessarily, infocom style games are just a subgenre of modern interactive fiction nowadays. Infocom style games are enormous and full of obscure puzzles, mazes, etc. that require hours and hours of gameplay. IF has branched out a lot and most stories are written to be completed in less than an hour and typically have less infuriating puzzles or mazes, along with complete help and hint systems.
There are tons of award winning IF stories that involve no real combat, puzzles, etc. and are just exploration of interesting environments or talking to characters. Check out some of the winners from the annual IF competition for a great sampling of modern IF: https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021
Emily Short in particular is someone who really pushes the boundaries of IF, her story Galatea from the early 2000s is a great example of how far beyond Infocom style games IF has gone: https://www.ifwiki.org/Emily_Short and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=urxrv27t7qtu52lb
Adam Cadre's Photopia [1] made me choke some tears. His 9:05 [2] is darkly comical, and is fun to explore again once you know what it is about.
Zarf's Spider and Web [3] is both a thrilling spy tale and a subversion of text adventure mechanics. For those who are never going to play this game, a minor spoiler. The setting is a fictional Cold War-style spy setting, your "adventure" is you being interviewed by your captor, recounting your story so far; for much of the game, whenever you make a false move -- the kind which would result in your death in a traditional adventure -- your captor will just simply tell you "...except that's not what actually happened, is it?" and rewind the story to the last checkpoint, where something has changed.
Then there's Rematch [4]. It's essentially a one-move game. One move -- that is, one complex multi-clause sentence -- and you die, except if you figure it out. And the kinds of things you can do in that one move are very complex!
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[1] Photopia: http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html
[2] 9:05: http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html
[3] Spider and Web: https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/
[4] Rematch: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=22oqimzgf8snv002
- A single room game where you have to get rid of your inventory (it's a lot more compelling than it sounds)
- Having to figure out a constructed language in a tribal setting to get medicine for your son
I remember at one point I managed to overcome a tricky part of the game, then lifted my head and smiled to myself, satisfied. Then I saw that the game printed at me "You smile in the darkness" and I went "wtf". People stared at me. At that time not too many people were busy with their phone during bus rides.
I get that they are trying to be maximally inclusive, but frankly I have no idea what they are talking about. These things are plainly apples and oranges. And there is great value to be found in both.
But saying these are directly comparable is roughly analogous to saying a point and click adventure game is comparable to a "quick time event" game. I think the IF community cedes too much ground with respect to parser games in the name of having a bigger tent.
There were a few related factors that led to the current state, where if anything parser IF is more on the margins than choice-based IF.
The first is that choice-based IF is far, far easier to write, debug, and release than parser-based IF. The barrier to entry is _much_ lower.
Because of this, the diversity of authors participating in the IF scene expanded quite a bit. Parser-based IF skewed really heavily toward the programmer demographic. Twine and other choice-based options brought in a lot of LGBTQ and minority authors who wanted to tell their stories but didn't have the programming background to do so with a parser-based engine.
Twine and other choice-based engines were designed web-first. They incorporated graphics and other visual features enabled by the browser environment while parser-based engines were still effectively stuck in VT-100 emulation mode.
Finally, choice-based IF is also often better at simulating interpersonal interaction and conversation than parser-based IF.
Parser-based IF stagnated for quite a while. Graham Nelson's Inform 7 programming language was a work of staggering genius, but it was a closed-source one man show for a very long time and didn't update to keep pace with what the choice-based engines were doing.
Inform 7 has just recently been open-sourced, with a rearchitected pipeline that should allow for some interesting integrations and enhancements. It will be interesting to see whether there's still sufficient interest around the tool such that the community brings it into the modern era. I certainly hope there is!
I would also note that, whatever the API, parser games still leave something to be desired in the year 2022 compared to what is now possible with other gaming frameworks. I'm thinking of indie games like Papers Please and Beholder. But also Twine, et al.
The parser interface accomplished beautiful things in its heyday, but now feels to me to be needlessly constrained and difficult. I think there is a future for text-based IF. I think there are entire genres of games that are only (theoretically) possible with that interface. But the usual <verb> <object> + inventory puzzles formula is just too narrow, too time-consuming to play anymore. And I say this from a place of love.
Even with all of this, people still got stuck, and properly pacing a story that uses an unconstrained parser world model is an exercise in frustration. But I disagree that the games are too narrow. If anything, the frustration comes in because they are too broad. No other game genre has the sheer hubris to present the player a story, tell them they are the main character, and then challenge them to literally do anything they can think of to overcome the puzzles they are presented with. "I got this," they say, presenting that blinking cursor on a blank line. "Anything you can imagine, I can handle."
Of course every parser title fails spectacularly at this. But the best ones fail in impressive and fascinating ways. S. John Ross's _Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom_ explicitly limits the number of verbs down to six, but succeeds in creating a game environment that is enjoyable on both the direct and meta levels. My own _Aotearoa_ does a lot to remove the normal barriers to entry to interactive fiction, at the cost of some immersion should you choose to use the cues and tutorials. Andrew Plotkin's _Hadean Lands_ and _Spider and Web_ both have high-stakes, complex stories with detailed world models. This is usually the recipe for frustration and failure in parser IF, but both titles implement wonderful unique, _diegetic_ mechanisms to motivate failure and experimentation.
I would hate to see parser IF go away. I think its innovations have been more valuable and influential than many people realize, and I think there's still a lot more that blank line and that blinking cursor have to offer.
The other main type of IF is the "parser" kind - that's the Infocom style where the UI is a bit like a command line, you type arbitrary commands, and get dynamic feedback. The main tool used nowadays for making that type of IF is Inform 7, though there are others.
Apropos of nothing, here's Julia Evans using Twine to teach debugging practices: https://computer-mysteries.netlify.app/slow-website.html
Hmm. I chose network tab, changed the dns and won. I don't think I experienced interactive fiction.
I'm using a heavily modified version of Cradle[0] and it works great.
However, I personally had a bad experience while trying to contribute to Twine. I encountered a severe bug that made me lose all my stories and only happens if you have Twine in another language than English. I read the code, identified the issue, wrote a detailed issue and sent a PR[1]. I got no answer until a year later saying "not applicable anymore" since the app basically got a rewrite.
At least I'm happy a lot of it got rewritten however it still seems as unstable as before, with random crashes and stories that can disappear on their own.
Since then I've contributed to his Patreon and out of all the people I support on patreon he is the most consistent with sending out weekly updates on his progress.
Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771022 - Dec 2019 (50 comments)
It's free software, and I've always enjoyed using it.
Another very impressive Twine game by the same author, 4x4 Archipelago [1], was fun to play, a randomly generated RPG with multiple plots. But it's wayy too long and requires some grinding.
They're both kind of like standard IF in that you have an inventory, you can use stuff from the inventory to do things and complete tasks, and you have to rely on hints to figure out what to do. Also both of them have no time-based elements and it's very obvious where to click.
Shameless plug, but: I've been working on a site with similar aims (although not exactly the same): Storylocks.com [https://www.storylocks.com/]. It's not exactly IF, but a simple way for multiple people to write stories together. Fiction writers unite!
"Malefactor” is a strategy text game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world."
[0]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas#twitter-adventure-maker
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/media-trend-choose-your-own-a...
Place I worked at a few years ago, used to have some mandatory courses about various of the company's concerns, like security practices, contract handling, or various other stuff. They decided to make it "fun" by having the courses done as some form of interactive thing which could certainly be done with Twine/Sugarcube.
It was hit and miss. I think there's a very thin line between writing something "entertaining" and something "awfully cringe". Some of the stuff was ok, but sometimes they veered a bit too much into writing some weirdly fantastic story over explaining whatever it was they wanted to explain.
So I'd say it is a valid tool in itself; it can work. But as with any other tool, the result depends a lot on how you use the tool.
https://research.facebook.com/publications/twine-a-unified-c...
The language, the tooling.. it all communicates effectively with the way my children think and approach things. Imagine a world of interactive literacy (note: not IF!)? This is a gamechanger for us.
I am a Senior Learning Technologist and currently working with lecturers for good ways for plotting out virtual home visits etc for health workers, and this is going to be a much better solution than what I was constructing at the time.
Essentially, I'd like to find a non-technical-writer-friendly UI for interactive stories that can output data appropriate for consumption in a game/app/system.
https://gitlab.com/elmstorygames/schemas/-/blob/master/0.7.0...