W8 Interactive Historytelling with Twine

Angus Mol, Aris Politopoulos

This workshop will provide an introduction to working with Twine 2 (www.twinery.org). Twine is a tool for the creation and publication of interactive narrative games. A good way to think of it is as the digital evolution of the “choose your own adventure” book. An oft-used platform for innovative indie and concept games. Twine also works great for creating interactive history. By allowing a play through of, for example, branching or multi-perspective histories, Twine can provide a new tool to think with for researchers, for teachers to engage students, or to present archaeological knowledge to larger audiences.

In this workshop we will provide an introduction to Twine, where we will discuss how to design interactive narratives, write and link passages, do basic styling and coding, and publish twines. After this, the workshop will take the shape of a mini-game jam where participants will work in teams of two to three on the creation of a Twine. At the close of the workshop we will play through and discuss the Twines that have been created during the day.

Twine 2 is free, browser-based, and outputs .html files, so all someone needs to participate is a laptop with an updated browser. Participants of this workshop should therefore bring their own laptops, which preferably should have an internet connection. If the latter is not possible, please download and install Twine 2’s most recent version for Windows (32-bit), macOSLinux (32-bit).

If you need some inspiration or wondering about what Twine games may look like? We suggest trying some of these before the start of the workshop:

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