clyde

Twine Recommendations

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So I love the cow farmer story in You Will Select A Decision.

Are you interested in trying to help me appreciate these Porpentine games? I am not feeling esalram's style and you include a lot of Porpentine's work. How would you instruct me to love it? 

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I don't know if there's a trick to it - I never really know what to tell people when they say they don't appreciate a good book, either, because unlike a movie or a video game or maybe even a song where it's fairly easy for me to come up with words to describe what's good about certain aspects of the piece, when it comes to written work I feel like the words speak for themselves and there is not much else I can say. You already liked one of porp's games (CRY$TAL WARRIOR KE$HA) so it's not like her entire oeuvre rubs you the wrong way - maybe try "Climbing 208 Feet up a Ruin Wall," which is more Ke$ha and less Cyberqueen.

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I was reading Lovecraft's collected works on the bus today, and it seems like you could make a really interesting Twine with passages from those. That might be an interesting weekend project.

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huh there was a twine thread after all. I think i put my rampant fanboyism of Ultra Business Tycoon III in the interactive fiction thread, but it probably deserves a mention here.

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I finished a short Twine game! It's not any of the overwhelmingly ambitious projects I've been working on, but I had an idea this morning that I wanted to include in a Twine story. I was able to do so, though you may not see the idea I wanted to include during your play-through. It's short.

 

Another Day, Another Dollar

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So after all the bullshit heaped on Quinn this week, I finally got around to playing Depression Quest, which is now on Steam (the first ever Twine game on Steam?). 

 

I was not prepared for just how effective it would be.  I found myself caring much more about my choices, and actually changing the direction I was going midway through.  I had intended to resist any attempts at treatment just to see what happened, but about halfway through I just couldn't continue down that road.  While I didn't personally identify with everything, there were certainly individual passages or days that struck a deep chord with me. 

 

Usually, in any game with story "choices", I often find myself agonizing over what to do, and then immediately wanting to know what the other options did.  Maybe it's just the length, but I had none of that with this.  Every choice felt very natural to me, even when it was the self-destructive choice.  The entire thing felt a million times more effective to me at conveying a sense of agency within the story than big budget games like Mass Effect. 

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Agreed. I went for the most sensible choice as much as possible, and it was still effective in showing how even when you do this, you're still hobbled by insecurity and physical lethargy, and just when you think you might be making progress another molehill looms.

 

It sounds like a tough experience, which it kind of is, but it's also simple to play and takes about half an hour to complete a playthrough, so I'd recommend it to everyone. The devs note that they hope it would be helpful for depressed people to play as well, as it may reassure them that many other people are having similar problems and thought processes.

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The first time I played it I decided to make the same decisions that I would probably make in real life even if I could see that one of the other choices was probably a more healthy one.

It was quite enlightening to see how that just took the character deeper and deeper into depression.

 

 

 The devs note that they hope it would be helpful for depressed people to play as well, as it may reassure them that many other people are having similar problems and thought processes.

 

It definitely helped me. There was one scene in there that I had pretty much experienced in my own life just a few weeks earlier. That was... emotional.

But yeah, just knowing that there are other people out there who have experienced something similar is quite a comfort. The solitude that comes from believing you're the only one is quite oppressive.

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I'm glad that I discovered what twine games are, and that they can be played on my phone. Needed something to distract me in slow days of work.

I finished the one with the fish, it was lovely.

Edit: the Ke$ha one is brilliant.

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I think it messed up for me at the end. It was pretty cool, though. (Almost as good as The Often-Ending Story.)

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@ashtonraze 's "Prom King (and other stories)" is pretty great. Contains both male and female frontal nudity for those of sensitive dispositions.

http://www.ashtonraze.com/thepromking

 

This doesn't really do it justice, but if pressed for a pithy summary I'd maybe say it's like dark high school noir told in a bit of a Rashomon style?

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I think it messed up for me at the end. It was pretty cool, though. (Almost as good as The Often-Ending Story.)

 

While it's possible that it messed up for you,

a certain degree of messed up-ness is what it's doing intentionally...

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Argh, just spent all day reading these (well, mostly those by merritt kopas and Porpentine, still have to take a stab at a lot of the other ones you've posted here) and they're nice and all, but damn, too weird, postmodern, queer for me to show it to my middle schoolers.

The Queer Pirate Plane is perfect were it not for the random queer in the title which I'd have to tapdance around somehow. Maybe I can just say YOU KNOW QHEER AS IN WEIRD!! The KE$HA one is great, but there is cursing in it and potentially complicated themes, uh... the arrow one is good and short, but maybe not atomic enough? Cuddlefish is cute and fun, but also um, not quite G-rated enough because of depictions of INVERTEBRATE SAME-SEX/DRAG NOOKIE.

Hero Room is perfect, do you guys know of any other ones light and airy along that line?

My kids are all into Homestuck which has its fare share of complex relationships and queerness and cursing, but they didn't get into Homestuck because some teacher told them about it, so while I'm positive they'd eat KE$HA up and be all into making something like that, I can't really be the one to show it to them... maybe if they were in high school I wouldn't freak out about it as much, but they're not and I'm not equipped to jump into these topics at all, or deal with parent fallout were that to happen.

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My light and airy Twine game is perfect for 10-14 year olds (with a tolerance for insta-death and Magnum pi references)!  :buyme:

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My light and airy Twine game is perfect for 10-14 year olds (with a tolerance for insta-death and Magnum pi references)!  :buyme:

 

It was great until

 

You die. You wake up screaming and covered in sweat. It was all a dream! You're actually a successful Interactive Fiction writer and today you're showing off your new game at PAX!

 

Unfortunately, your brilliantly designed and yet overlong dream led you to sleep in and miss the latest Penny Arcade comic, which portrays all IF writers as paedophiles. Arriving at the expo, you are immediately lynched to death by a group of people wearing DEATH TO IF WRITERS J/K LOL t-shirts.

 

¬¬¬¬¬

 

And on second playtru I met your barmaid.

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I'm pretty sure a few of the kids would get that it's satire. But I'm afraid of poe and I'm afraid of humorless parents and I am afraid of even coasting close to themes that could derrail the class. It is difficult enough to hold 30 kids on topic as it is without encouraging them to play a game that allows them to objectify a female npc in three different ways. I would not think twice if these were high schoolers :/

 

Ugh, its so weird to be in a position of having to make these sorts of calls.

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I really enjoyed Horse Mastery the game of horse mastery

http://noncanon.com/HorseMaster.html

I haven't played it looking for questionable material though. It's got a Philip K. Dick vibe, but from what I remember, all the crime and drug use instances are reflective of the culture rather than glorified. The narrative is one I would love to discuss with middle-school kids; there are lots of relevant themes.

Like I said though, it's been a while; there might be some questionable stuff that's not accepted as distopia.

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Yeah that is not a game I'd have kids play.

 

I feel like asking why, but figure that I would have to play through again to ask with any sincerity.

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