Twine is tool for creating choose-your-own-adventure style text games.

I’ve just played a fun example of using Twine to educate people about the work cataloguers do: the Cataloguing Game by Victoria Parkinson.

I like it because it gives you a gentle but hands-on experience of what it’s like to catalogue a book. (It also gives you a choice of hot chocolate, coffee or tea.)

I’ve played a few Twine games, but I haven’t seen many educational ones like this. A quick google pulls up a few articles about using Twine and interactive fiction in the classroom:

• Interactive Fiction in the Classroom
• Game Based Learning and Twine

Outside the classroom

I currently work on a software support desk, and I’ve idly considered replacing our troubleshooting flowcharts with a Twine game. Past a certain complexity, flowcharts get too hard to read, whereas a Twine game limits you to exactly the choices you need to make. Maintaining it would be the hardest part.

I made short Twine game years ago, just to test it out, based on something that happened to me on a tram: Bystander

I’m really like the work Tegean Webb does. Start with Young Spells, about teenage girls preparing a witchcraft ritual.

And my first real introduction to Twine was the bizarre and surreal Mastaba Snoopy. Perhaps not really safe for work, or sanity.