Tag Archives: diy games

Love Poems and Games: Twined Together

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For most gamers, Zork is the classic example of a choose-your-own-adventure, text-based gaming experience. Although Oregon Trail is relatively adorned in images, italso fits the bill. When I think of this genre of game, my mind goes down a slightly different path. Instead, I first think of the Zork parody Thy Dungeonman, hosted on Flash cartoon site Homestar Runner. Then, I think of the queer indie games made in the early 2010s on Twine.

Open-source, hypertext-based storytelling tool Twine was invented by web developer Chris Klimas thirteen years ago. At the time, Klimas had no way of knowing what a hit the program would be in the indie gaming community, but was inspired by the creativity of its users to keep improving its functionality. On November 3, 2009, he wrote about finding a love poem that Dan Waber was scripting in Twine, and said, as a way of explaining “Why I’m Doing This,” “what I’m doing helps people do real things, to make poetry even. There aren’t that many developers out there making things that people make poetry with. I feel lucky.”

Black Mirror imports the choose-your-own-adventure format to viewers’ TV screens

Perhaps Twine’s greatest brush with mainstream fame occurred when the creative team behind Black Mirror used it to storyboard the interactive episode “Bandersnatch.” Mostly, however, Twine has occupied a countercultural space in the world of storytelling. As Adi Robertson wrote in last year’s “Text Adventures: How Twine Remade Gaming,” “Twine’s simplicity felt liberating. It imbued games with the DIY spirit of homemade zines, many of them weirder, sharper, and queerer than their mainstream counterparts.”

In 2013, The Guardian‘s gaming blog shared a post entitled, “Anna Anthropy and the Twine Revolution.” Anna Anthropy isn’t the only game designer highlighted in the article as a revolutionary in the world of gaming; merritt k and Porpentine Charity Heartscape are also mentioned as crucial figures who made the most of Twine’s capacities. Heartscape’s Twine works include Howling Dogs, an award-winning claustrophobic simulation of a prison cell, and k’s include (ASMR) Vin Diesel DMing a Game of D&D Just For You, which is exactly what it sounds like. As we ring in LGBTQ pride month, the Anna Anthropy Twine game that I’d like to look at closer is called Queers in Love at the End of the World.

Queers in Love at the End of the World lasts exactly ten seconds, time kept by a countdown in the corner of the screen. The game begins with the white text on a black screen, “In the end, like you always said, it’s just the two of you together. You have ten seconds, but there’s so much you want to do: kiss her, hold her, take her hand, tell her.” Each of the bolded words is clickable, leading to more options for how exactly you might want to spend these last moments. No matter what, when the countdown reaches zero, the game ends the same way: “Everything is wiped away” (more lyrical than The Oregon Trail’s “You have died of dysentery”). Clicking through to the afterword provides one last piece of context, the scrawled words, “WHEN WE HAVE EACH OTHER WE HAVE EVERYTHING.”

A year after dubbing Anna Anthropy a leader of the Twine Revolution, The Guardian published games critic Cara Ellison’s “A Verse About Queers in the Love at the End of the World.” The subheading, “Twine developer Anna Anthropy turns game mechanics into poetry,” calls back to Klimas’ early inspiration: love poetry. Ellison’s verse refers to the ten-second timer as “tyrannical,” in agreement with Adi Robertson’s claim that Twine games “can compromise [the] sense of control” that a reader would normally have over the pacing of a choose-your-own-adventure-story. Ellison writes: “I want to treat those Twine rooms like Carrie’s prom night and gut them / I want to call that timer’s parents and say DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT HAS DONE TO ME,” pouring frustration onto the page. This is a desperate, angry love poem to a simultaneously brief and expansive interactive love poem.

My earlier post about translating poetry encouraged you to approach poems as games, with a willingness to engage in creative, productive failures. The queer Twine revolution of the last decade shows that it is also possible to treat games as poems. Any game built from language has the capacity to be movingly lyrical and verbally innovative (even a game of Dungeons & Dragons DMed by Vin Diesel). The first Twine Revolution may have passed, but Twine is still an available tool. Why not take it for a spin and map out a poem-game of your own? The second Twine Revolution might begin right on your laptop.

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Candyland: Pastime or Past Its Prime?

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If you ask the average person to name five board games off the top of their head, you can pretty readily guess some of their replies. Monopoly is always there, Scrabble is often second, and then you’ll get a smattering of Candyland, Chutes & Ladders, Sorry, and the like, and then a few outliers like Mouse Trap, Trouble, The Game of Life, and so on.

Candyland is a perennial name on that list, but if you look around the Internet where modern board game enthusiasts congregate, Candyland often appears on lists of the worst board games.

Why is that? Does Candyland get a bad rap?

Well, yes and no.

Strangely enough, the reason that causes so many game fans to put it on “worst” lists is the same reason it is celebrated as a good intro game for children: lack of choice.

Candyland isn’t really a game. There are no moves to make, no strategy to employ. Nothing you say or do will make you the winner. The game is purely one of chance. Once the deck is shuffled, the game is essentially over. (Chutes & Ladders and the card game War suffer from the same problem.)

Defenders of Candyland say that this is intentional… which is true. The game was designed to entertain and distract children either suffering from polio or trapped inside because of polio.

But defenders also argue that the game teaches children about reading instructions, learning to take turns, pattern-recognition, and more, all without the “complication” of actual tasks to complete.

But this is a weak argument, because virtually ANY game can teach these things and still offer children choices to make that affect the game.

Still, kids absolutely love Candyland. It’s bright and simple and silly, and the characters are charming.

So, what can we do to make the game engaging for solvers who actually want to do something, but won’t alienate the simplicity factor that makes it appealing to the youngest board game fans among us?

We institute some house rules!

1. Pick a card

Give the players two, three, or four cards to choose from. By allowing them to actually choose a card, there’s some level of strategy involved, even if it’s still a race to the end.

A variation on this idea is the push-your-luck house rule. In a regular game of Candyland, after you draw your card, you can ditch it for a second random draw. If you choose the second card, you must play it. This is a simple modification, but one that still allows players to affect the game in a meaningful way. Do you press your luck or accept the card you know you have?

2. Spot the color

One house rule suggested that a child should have to look around the room and point out an object that’s the same color as the card before they can move forward. While this doesn’t affect the gameplay, it does reinforce the idea that you can use Candyland to teach pattern recognition.

[A gritty reboot of Candyland by artist Shira-Chan.]

3. Deception

Now, it’s probably not a great idea to teach your kids about lying through board games. (After all, you’ll never be able to trust them in a game of Battleship ever again.) But adding a deception element can turn Candyland into an introductory poker game.

Basically, you draw your card, and announce your move without showing the card. If someone thinks you’re lying, they can call you out.

If you are lying, you don’t move AND you lose your next turn. But if you’re not lying, the player who accused you loses a turn.

4. Add trivia

This was a variation in my house on more than one occasion. Since there are six colors on the game board — and six categories in Trivial Pursuit — we combined the two.

When you draw a color card, you must answer a question of the corresponding color. Get it right, and you move on. Get it wrong, you stay where you are.

There are all sorts of terrific ideas out there to make Candyland more enjoyable for players of all ages — for instance, we found some good suggestions listed here which we didn’t cover — and with a little creativity, you can resurrect a classic and make it new again.

And we’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s a good or bad game after that.

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