Link Search Menu Expand Document
Storytelling with Twine

Introduction

Twine describes itself as “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories”. It’s designed to be easy to use out of the box with no prior knowledge of web technologies or conditional logic but is also possible to do more with when you’re ready. Twine files are static web documents that you can embed content into, publish through minimal resources, and for

Explore the Twine website for a number of useful resources including the Twine Cookbook which is a reference resource with lots of examples!

Minimal Computing

Using a static site approach for digital storytelling prioritises longevity and different types of computational “minimalism”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the project is simple just that it has characteristics that will make it durable. Usually Minimal Computing appraches generally means making use of simple file formats such as text files (.md, .txt, .html, .csv, .tsv, and more!).

The goal of Minimal Computing is to answer two questions:

  • Who will be able to see your work in 10 years?
  • Will they be able to see it or use it?

Minimal might mean:

  • Constrained
  • Underfunded
  • Fewer total number of technologies
  • Easier to maintain long-term
  • Fewer “dependencies”
  • Formats that are “future proofed”

Read more about Minimal Computing here: https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/about/

Practice good UX (User Experience)

Whenever you make a resource for the web it is important to consider a few basics of how the web works.

Jacob Nielsen’s Heuristics for usability design are a gold standard for quality web content that is easy to use. They cover basic elements that a creator should consider including to enable easy participation by a user.Important heuristics in the digital storytelling space are “visibility of system status”, “recognition rather than recall”, and “user control and freedom”.

  • Visibility of system status simply means that a user is aware of where they are in the story as they progress through it (books do this through page numbers).
  • Recognition rather than recall refers to giving users sufficient prompts to remember important information which lightens the cognitive load of interaction (eg. through repetition or summary moments). This is especially important with complex and information-rich projects.
  • User control and freedom refers to the ability to backtrack or undo mistakes. Users click on things by mistake sometimes and (unless it’s important for the narrative that they can’t go back) giving them the opportunity to backtrack or undo improves their ability to interact with your project.

Assessing for heuristic alignment:

  • consider running occasional heuristic evaluations on your project as you create it (not just at the end)
  • once you have a prototype you can also try running a light usability test with someone who is not familiar with it