Twine Before Twine: Media Archaeology and Early Twine Works from 2006 to 2012
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 3:30 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 4:30 PM
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Abstract
The authoring tool Twine celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, yet most of the celebrated works from the tool were published after 2012. Much of its early life, from core ideas appearing in the tool Twee in 2006, the brief history of the graphical tool Tweebox, and the eventual journey of Twine through its 1.0 version history, remain largely unexplored with initial academic coverage only beginning in 2014. Many works from this early period are also missing from hobby archives such Glorious Trainwrecks, a site for “throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks” that hosted early Twine 1.0 documentation and guides as well as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and video game platform and store front itch.io, both of which began tracking Twine works in 2013. This talk seeks to fill in some of the missing history of Twine by examining the history of the tool and active work done to find and archive early works. This talk especially highlights how the current tool has deep connections to concepts and core functionality dating back to early iterations in Twee and Tweebox, initial attempts at an authoring tool and graphical user interface for creating digital stories. Through treating the output of Twine, HTML with special elements containing story data, as a medium changed over time, this talk traces not only how stories from the tool are represented in data, but how layers of meaning are built into the tool across time, pointing to how early decisions in its design laid the foundation for later functionality and how different examples along its history showcase this important history.
Recommended Citation
Cox, Dan, "Twine Before Twine: Media Archaeology and Early Twine Works from 2006 to 2012" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 5.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/5
Twine Before Twine: Media Archaeology and Early Twine Works from 2006 to 2012
Hypertexts & Fictions
The authoring tool Twine celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, yet most of the celebrated works from the tool were published after 2012. Much of its early life, from core ideas appearing in the tool Twee in 2006, the brief history of the graphical tool Tweebox, and the eventual journey of Twine through its 1.0 version history, remain largely unexplored with initial academic coverage only beginning in 2014. Many works from this early period are also missing from hobby archives such Glorious Trainwrecks, a site for “throwing a bunch of random crap into your game and keeping whatever sticks” that hosted early Twine 1.0 documentation and guides as well as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and video game platform and store front itch.io, both of which began tracking Twine works in 2013. This talk seeks to fill in some of the missing history of Twine by examining the history of the tool and active work done to find and archive early works. This talk especially highlights how the current tool has deep connections to concepts and core functionality dating back to early iterations in Twee and Tweebox, initial attempts at an authoring tool and graphical user interface for creating digital stories. Through treating the output of Twine, HTML with special elements containing story data, as a medium changed over time, this talk traces not only how stories from the tool are represented in data, but how layers of meaning are built into the tool across time, pointing to how early decisions in its design laid the foundation for later functionality and how different examples along its history showcase this important history.
Bio
Daniel Cox (he/they) is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Central Florida. They authored Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language (2021) and their dissertation, “Do You Want to Build with Snowman?”: Positioning Twine Story Formats Through Critical Code Study (2023), reported on the social and technical history of the authoring tool Twine and one of its built-in story formats, Snowman. They maintain and have contributed to many open-source projects connected to digital authoring tools.