Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine Press Kit

Hypertext! Hyperpunishment! Click links while your heart sinks! Read texts and repent your defects! Enjoy the Twine! Your soul’s on the line!

Play Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 3 July 2019
Platform: Browser (desktop and mobile)
Code repository: https://github.com/pippinbarr/lets-play-ancient-greek-punishment-the-twine
Price: $0.00

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine is the ninth edition in the Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment series begun in 2011 and comprising: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011), Art Edition Edition (2015), Limited Edition (2016), CPU Edition (2017), Inversion Edition (2019), UI Edition (2019), Teaches Typing (2019), and Chess Edition. In The Twine the punishments are presented as hypertext fiction using the much-loved story-making software Twine.

History

The Twine is part of my ongoing idea of essentially spending 2019 making variations on the base Ancient Greek Punishment set of minigames as a way to remain “productive” while in transition to a life with a new baby.

This game has involved engaging with (my perception of) the typical uses of Twine as a story-telling platform and thinking about how to fit my repeated retellings of the punishment myths into this format in an appropriate way. As is usually the case, I’ve been particularly interested to leverage the various technical aspects available in Twine (cycling links, linked passages, text-modifiers) in order to convey the eternal spirit of the individual punishments in a medium-specific way.

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine is also another data-point in the ultra-detailed process documentation approach called MDMA. So, if you want to, you can read a lot about the game’s development by reading its process documentation, by going through its commit history, and by reading the research questions.

Technology

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine was created in Twine, a one-stop shop for building simple (or quite complicated) stories for play in the browser, largely based around passages of text connected by hyperlinks.

License

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine is an open source game licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can obtain the source code from its code repository on GitHub.