Twine and Interactive Fiction Research

This guide introduces interactive fiction games and Twine, a tool for developing text-based games, in the context of research projects and classroom assignments. It follows the general idea of games as a form of digital storytelling within the field of digital scholarship, with Twine being one example of a game development tool. 

This guide draws in large part on the long-standing technical documentation and community resources built and maintained by the Twine community, while also focusing on the part of that community that looks at Twine games and Twine itself in a scholarly context. As such, the resources highlighted in this guide are a mix of information shared among indie or hobbyist game developers, players, researchers, and games journalists.

The following table of contents outlines all the sections in this guide.

• Interactive Fiction Games: A short section on defining the genre of interactive fiction games, sharing some development tools, and highlighting resources used by the interactive fiction games community to showcase their work.

• Game Writing and Analysis: A list of resources for understanding how to write for games and analyze them as an artistic medium.

• Twine Technical Manuals and Guides: A list of resources for learning the technical aspects of Twine game development, including official documentation and a masterlist of Twine resources.

• Twine Accessibility: A selection of research, standards, and community discussions on making Twine accessible for disabled people, including Twine’s compatibility with screen readers, and the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Standards from the Web Accessibility Initiative.

• Twine Customization Options: A section for references to Twine templates and guides on customizing your Twine game with markup languages (HTML and CSS).

• Twine in Scholarship: A short, non-comprehensive list of scholarly literature and journalism published about Twine, as well as groups and conferences dedicated to interactive fiction.

• Interactive Fiction Games in Academia: A selection of interactive fiction games developed in an academic context, along with a selection of studios at universities developing games in the classroom.