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Fear of Twine
Some dude put together a "digital exhibition" of Twine games, and since I didn't feel like doing anything productive today, I decided to play every single one of them. Here are my semi-snarky 1-2 sentence reviews:
Of all of them, "The Matter of the Great Red Dragon" is the only one I'd generally recommend. "Coyotaje" and "Abstract State-warp Machines" are good if you're in the mood for an interactive fiction-ish thing already.
In general, I keep wanting Twine games to be better than they are. They seem to attract a pretty interesting community, but I'm starting to suspect the problem I have with a lot of them is the same problem I have with flash fiction.
That is—a few years ago I remember digging through a bunch of "best of flash fiction" lists, books, etc, to try and find cool stuff being done in the medium, and found myself walking away from most of the pieces with an "eh" feeling. See, poetry can be short and effective—because a huge portion of the power of poetry rests in the rhythm and the music of words, and thus can turn a trite or cheesy observation into something magical within two dozen lines.
Prose doesn't do that. I mean, the rhythm and music in prose do matter, of course, but the real power is somewhere deeper—in the character or the plot or the story you're trying to tell—and the scant few hundred words most flash fiction pieces have to work with is certainly not enough to establish any fully-fleshed-out character or more than a single scene.*
So flash fiction—and Twine games as well, I think—end up either going one of two routes—either (1) something that tries to tug at your emotions in a sort of mawkish, Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul-ish way ("Debt" felt this way to me, even though it was a really well-constructed obvious mawkish thing so I feel kind of bad saying it), or (2) something immediately, eye-grabbingly "different" and experimental ("Drosophilia", "When Acting as a Wave"). And then I guess there's the awkward category of (3), in which the story tries to ditch character and plot in favor of conveying something solely through mood/atmosphere—something like "The Work," which I found interesting but ultimately didn't feel like an actual story, so I walked away dissatisfied.
But the Dragon one is pretty fun, so it wasn't a total waste :P
* Note that fanfiction authors often can pull off flash-fiction-ish drabble-ish things quite well—but I think that's because canon's already done half the work. Five hundred words on characters we already know, invoking an atmosphere we're already intimately familiar with, can be quite powerful. It's in original stuff where this becomes a problem.
- Debt: well-written, but wow that music at the end is overdone, and I saw the ending coming from 800 miles away soooo
- Duck Ted Bundy: Goofy sense of humor. Got old for me before I managed to kill all the ducks, but worth a few laughs.
- The Conversation I Can't Have: BDSM_101.doc
- The Matter of the Great Red Dragon: What a delightfully postmodern/silly plot twist
- Zombies and Elephants: The writing is "thick" in a way that suggests the author was really more used to writing short stories than interactive fiction, but the setting and concept is kind of cool, though I am sick to fucking death of zombies.
- Workers in Progress: Marxism_101.doc
- Saturday Night: if I wanted to have dissatisfying failed attempts to hook up with Craigslist strangers, I feel like I could've done it on my own time, also it probably would've been more interesting than this
- Truth is Ghost: y'know I was reading pretty carefully and I'm pretty sure I'm not 100% dumb, so the fact that I have no idea what the hell happened is probably a bad thing
- When Acting as a Wave: You're a lawmaker or something? I found it kind of vague and it lacked a proper payoff.
- The Girl in the Haunted House: "Eh"-ish horror-ish thing
- The Scientific Method: hmm where have i seen this one before
- Drosophilia: okay REALLY what the hell just happened; I couldn't read half the damn text because of the youtube videos and it kept loading content in weird and erratic ways so I gave up
- Abstract State-warp Machines (ASwM): Written in blank verse—no, really. Also kind of charming, and offers some of the better replay value of the bunch; some of the paths connect in interesting ways.
- The Work: Interesting and atmospheric, but doesn't offer much "punch", I guess? See rambly paragraph below
- Coyotaje: You're a "coyote" trying to smuggle people across the Mexico-U.S. border. This one was pretty interesting; I wound up replaying it quite a bit to see all the ways shit could go wrong
- Tweezer: A spoofy humorous fantasy mini-adventure—I died of a cocaine overdose in my first run. Similar to Duck Ted Bundy in that I found it amusing, but not amusing enough to play all the routes
Of all of them, "The Matter of the Great Red Dragon" is the only one I'd generally recommend. "Coyotaje" and "Abstract State-warp Machines" are good if you're in the mood for an interactive fiction-ish thing already.
In general, I keep wanting Twine games to be better than they are. They seem to attract a pretty interesting community, but I'm starting to suspect the problem I have with a lot of them is the same problem I have with flash fiction.
That is—a few years ago I remember digging through a bunch of "best of flash fiction" lists, books, etc, to try and find cool stuff being done in the medium, and found myself walking away from most of the pieces with an "eh" feeling. See, poetry can be short and effective—because a huge portion of the power of poetry rests in the rhythm and the music of words, and thus can turn a trite or cheesy observation into something magical within two dozen lines.
Prose doesn't do that. I mean, the rhythm and music in prose do matter, of course, but the real power is somewhere deeper—in the character or the plot or the story you're trying to tell—and the scant few hundred words most flash fiction pieces have to work with is certainly not enough to establish any fully-fleshed-out character or more than a single scene.*
So flash fiction—and Twine games as well, I think—end up either going one of two routes—either (1) something that tries to tug at your emotions in a sort of mawkish, Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul-ish way ("Debt" felt this way to me, even though it was a really well-constructed obvious mawkish thing so I feel kind of bad saying it), or (2) something immediately, eye-grabbingly "different" and experimental ("Drosophilia", "When Acting as a Wave"). And then I guess there's the awkward category of (3), in which the story tries to ditch character and plot in favor of conveying something solely through mood/atmosphere—something like "The Work," which I found interesting but ultimately didn't feel like an actual story, so I walked away dissatisfied.
But the Dragon one is pretty fun, so it wasn't a total waste :P
* Note that fanfiction authors often can pull off flash-fiction-ish drabble-ish things quite well—but I think that's because canon's already done half the work. Five hundred words on characters we already know, invoking an atmosphere we're already intimately familiar with, can be quite powerful. It's in original stuff where this becomes a problem.