A Personal Twine Story

by Chris Klimas

Were you at the ELO conference back in 2007, 17 years ago? It happened in College Park, Maryland.

I was.

I couldn’t find a photo of myself at this event, but I found myself in the attendee list. I wasn’t a speaker and I wasn’t a student, either, even though it says University of Maryland next to my name in the list. 2007 was about two years before I released the first version of Twine. I want to explain how I ended up at ELO 2007, how I became interested in electronic literature, and why I made Twine.

The short answer to these questions is community.

This is a personal story, but I have an argument to make: the field of electronic literature is full of experimenters and pioneers. I think everybody would agree with that. It’s full of people who see a platform and immediately see ways to express themselves creatively using it. I’m amazed by the ingenuity people display to express themselves using all sorts of platforms that weren’t originally particularly designed for creative expression, like Google Forms.

Rarer, though, are platforms that live inside the field of electronic literature like Twine does. Platforms are hard. They take a lot of resources to create and they take even more to keep going. I also think there are many forces in the world that work against them and make it even harder than it needs to be for them to exist.

At the same time, there’s a real virtue in platforms. They empower less experimental—and I mean experimental in a technological sense—authors. Oftentimes, platforms are the seed of community. If we both use the same tool, that immediately gives us something to talk about. We can trade tricks, we can complain about what doesn’t work well—the same kind of discussions people have had about tools since the Stone Age.

I believe for electronic literature to remain the vibrant field that it is, it needs to continue to gain new platforms. And these platforms should be owned and created by human beings, not massive corporations. I’m not totally anti-corporate, to be clear. I mean corporations like Google, Apple, or Amazon.

This is not intended to describe a series of precise steps we should all follow, because the next platform won’t be made by somebody who looks like me, and it won’t be made by somebody who thinks like me, either. I want to discuss ways that I think we can help to encourage these platforms to be created and for them to grow.

This isn’t a prescription, but it is a memory essay in the sense that The Glass Menagerie is a memory play. There have been many times when I’ve discussed Twine and remember things happening in a certain order, or someone saying or doing something, and then later, discovering hard proof that I was incorrect. Very embarrassingly, I had the wrong date for when the first release of Twine happened and other people had to correct me. So if I get something inaccurate here, it’s unintentional, and I ask for your forgiveness in advance.

My immersion in open culture began at a very early age, at one of the oldest institutions of open culture we have: the public library. I grew up in a solidly middle-class family. My father worked in the bureaucracy of the federal government, and my mom stayed at home and raised my sister and I. For us, the public library was a major form of entertainment. Every three weeks, we went there and filled a banker’s box with books, the four of us. People hated being behind us in the checkout line.

You might not be surprised to learn my favorite spot in the library was the shelves of Choose Your Own Adventure books. My library had a dedicated section for CYOA, and at least in my memory, they had literally every single one. Shelves and shelves of the books.

I don’t believe Choose Your Own Adventure is high literature. I wouldn’t try to describe it in those terms. But I think its impact is often underestimated. I think that we enter a field through humble doors. Before we read Ulysses, we read The Baby-Sitters Club and Bunnicula.

I say this to highlight the importance of resources like public libraries. I’d hope we all agree public libraries are a force for good. But it’s important we continue to protect them. I think public libraries in the United States have been under attack for quite a long time, and things are getting worse.

Also not surprisingly, another major force in my childhood that led toward Twine was the school computer lab. I was very lucky because my elementary school was one of the first in the county to have a full-fledged computer lab—around 20 or 30 Apple II computers, in my memory. I don’t think this was a common thing then. We got to use them during class, of course, but there was also a computer club where we could use them for whatever purposes we wanted for a couple hours after school. I went to every computer club meeting I could.

My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but she also wrote textbooks at that time, and one year she received enough royalties for us to afford a computer. My school’s vice-principal, who ran the computer club, said to my mom: go ahead and copy the entire school library. Just buy a box of disks and you can copy anything you want. So everything I had been able to try out at school, I could now use as long as I wanted at home.

If you think about this in modern terms, it was a massive intellectual property violation. But no one thought of it like that at the time. This taught me that media was meant to be shared, but also that it had value. Sometimes people think these things are in opposition to each other, but I don’t.

These two things—the computer lab and the public library—collided for me in one computer game: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Growing up, we had a Christmas ritual where my parents would give a certain number of presents to my sister and me to wrap for the other parent and pretend they were from us. It was this game that was my job to wrap one year.

It was an unusual box. It was not shrink-wrapped in my memory. I could literally open the box up. It was shaped a little like a record sleeve, where on one side was the floppy disk with the game on it, and the other side held a manual that I could open and read on my own. I read it really, really carefully, trying not to crease it and make my father realize that I had opened his gift before he had.

I fell in love with the field of electronic literature, reading the manual to this game. It had a sample transcript of what it’s like to play a text parser game. It made me realize the form was something greater than the Choose Your Own Adventure books I’d been reading. CYOAs exist in a book form, mostly. You can flip through them and see everything they have to offer. A computer game felt like it was limitless, that it could tell stories in ways simply impossible in printed form.

Once I got access to the Internet in late high school, I found a bunch of people online who also loved parser games. I think I took three main values from the parser game community I joined. First of all, we were obsessed with preservation. There was a feeling in the community that parser games were the creative height of computer games and everything else that came after it wasn’t as good, and wasn’t as serious. This led to a belief parser games constituted a golden age that needed to be preserved, and perhaps someday the rest of the world would recognize that golden age too.

There was also a strong sense of a gift economy in the parser game community. I think this is true of many fan communities even now, where the original works—in our case the parser games of the 80s and early 90s—were highly valued. We frowned on pirating the games themselves. But there was a feeling that everything else surrounding them, including the games we were creating that modelled themselves after the originals, shouldn’t be sold commercially.

Most of the tools we used, like Inform, were given away for free. This led to a cycle where if you used something for free, then it felt like you ought to give away the thing you made with it for free. Otherwise, you were being selfish. In general, the furthest the community ever moved in the direction of any kind of commercial arrangement was shareware. (If you don’t know what shareware was, ask your parents.)

The third value of this community was near-religious worship of Infocom, the corporation which produced the parser games our community most respected. I think this was inherited from the marketing that Infocom did at the time. They positioned themselves as producing high-quality games with literary qualities, and there was an element of truth to that. The prose in the games was edited by honest-to-goodness editors hired from the publishing field, and two of their designers were admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America. Of course, like all effective marketing, it grew a life of its own.

One practical effect of this worship of Infocom was that we inherited the idea of virtual machines from them. Infocom created a virtual machine they termed the z-machine, which essentially was a player for their games, like Flash was later. This was an economic move because there were so many platforms at the time—Apple, IBM, Atari, Commodore, and so on—and it would have been cost-prohibitive to port all their games individually. So they built a virtual machine that, once they ported that to a particular platform, they could sell their entire library without any further effort.

This virtual machine had a side effect of allowing our community to exist across platforms and to think in a cross-platform manner. Our community was small instead of extremely small. I think most of the folks in the community used Windows, but it didn’t matter that I had a Mac. I could still play almost all the games the community created. Graham Nelson wrote Inform, a compiler for the z-machine with contemporary developer ergonomics, on a computer I had never heard of at the time called the Acorn Archimedes. Even though he did it on that particular computer, it didn’t matter because he wrote Inform in C and the community could port it over without much trouble.

I continued in the parser game community for a good while, but eventually, somewhere in undergraduate school, I felt like the stories that I wanted to make began to push against what I perceived as the boundaries of the parser game genre.

Graham Nelson famously wrote in The Craft of Adventure that “an adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative.” I didn’t want to write crosswords. I’m still not great at puzzles. And I got hung up on some aspects of creating parser games, like simulation. Every time I set about writing a scene, I thought I needed to program every little bit of scenery I could imagine around the characters in order for the world to feel real. Then I’d have to account for the player wandering off or doing something irrelevant, and at that point I felt ready to give up on the entire endeavor.

Now that I’m more mature as a designer, I have a better handle on how to handle these kinds of things, but at the time they felt unsurmountable. They were things that I didn’t want to spend my time thinking about. At the same time, I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to start thinking about.

Not knowing what you want to do as a creative person is a really scary place to be, because you begin to think: well, if I don’t know what I want to do, maybe I’m just not that good at being creative. Maybe I don’t have any ideas. But I also believe not knowing often leads to amazing things. It did for me.

It was around this point, when I was feeling dissatisfied with parser games, I started to learn about e-literature of the 90s. The way I learned about it wasn’t through experiencing it directly. I didn’t study it formally in a class. I learned about it by reading critical writing about e-literature—open resources like blog posts.

I think blogging and other forms of thinking out loud can feel a little bit like shouting into a void. I’ve certainly written blog posts before and thought, “Maybe ten people will read this.” It could be true nobody really cares about what you write. But maybe it just needs to be one person who really needs to hear it. I know, because I was that one person. The blogging people did about e-literature had an immense effect on my creative trajectory.

It became clear to me the folks who were working on e-literature in the 90s-unlike the people in the community I’d come from who thought of themselves mostly as game designers with some literary ambition-considered themselves purely as writers who happened to be writing for a new medium. I really, really liked that. It was exciting to me because it validated a lot of ways I was thinking about things.

The other influential thing that I came across at this point was Acid-Free Bits, which is 20 years old this year. I was astounded at how relevant it remains today. It discusses how to create digital media in a way that’s going to ensure your creation is accessible for many, many years to come. Partly because of Acid-Free Bits, I decided that the web was the right platform for me.

I created a lot of experiments. What stuck for me was a piece of software called TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is like many other kinds of wikis, but there were three things about it that energized me. First of all, it had a tight feedback loop. I could toggle quickly between editing a work and experiencing it as a reader. There was no compile button and there were no syntax errors to worry about. I could rapidly experiment.

TiddlyWiki was also intensely individual. Wikis are generally community resources. They live on a server somewhere, lots of people can view and edit them, and you have one or more admins running the show. A TiddlyWiki, by contrast, was a file that existed only on my computer. When I wanted to make a new one, I only had to copy the file. This gave me permission to feel free, creatively. I didn’t have to create an account somewhere. My work didn’t have to live in the cloud. If I didn’t want to share it, then it was no big deal.

The third thing about TiddlyWiki was that it was really messy. It encouraged a messy writing structure. It didn’t have a map view of any kind. It had a search, and you could put tags on what I’d eventually call passages, but that was about all you could do to organize your work. The upside to this was it encouraged me to keep writing, to go on wild tangents and not worry about where they would land. I could follow my instincts as I was writing.

But this messiness got unwieldy for writing stories of a certain size. So I adapted TiddlyWiki for longer works. I printed out the TiddlyWiki source code and took it with me on the subway on the way to work. I jotted notes in the margin and highlighted things I didn’t understand. Based on that, I built small command-line tools that allowed me to work in a way that made sense to me, but eventually generated TiddlyWikis. Of course, TiddlyWiki had an open source license, so I could do that.

I think platforms build on each other. They don’t usually emerge from nothing. They certainly react to each other. And so of course, open source helps that conversation happen.

At the time, I really missed having the kind of community I had when I was working in the parser format. I felt like nobody else understood what I was doing with TiddlyWiki. I found an email I wrote around 2007 while I was doing research for this piece. I thought perhaps a graduate program could be a place where I could find a community, and so I wrote to the director of one grad program: “My problem with finding a grad program in general is that what I’d like to study is a kind of a narrow, obscure field. Interactive narrative is the best way to describe it. I’m not really interested in making games, but instead writing stories that react to the reader in different ways.”

First, I’d like to apologize for calling interactive narrative narrow or obscure. Of course, I don’t believe that to be true now, but it was the way I felt then. The person I was writing to was Nancy Kaplan, who at the time was director of the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore, and I wanted to know if I could study interactive narrative in that program. Nancy was incredibly kind to me, which isn’t a surprise if you know her. It was while I was enrolled in her program that I created the first version of Twine, years later.

Around this time is also when I went to the ELO conference in 2007. At this point, I had become aware of ELO in a sideways kind of manner, through those blog posts I mentioned. I asked my boss at the time to take a day off to go to the conference. At this point, I was a web developer in the IT department of a school at the University of Maryland’s downtown Baltimore campus. My boss was very kind about this and told me, “You don’t need to take off a day. Just go and represent us.” I remember thinking I didn’t understand—it had nothing to do with my job—but I wasn’t going to say no to this offer.

The ELO meeting turned out to be a tough experience. I didn’t know anybody there. I sat in the back and didn’t introduce myself to anybody, because I’m an introverted person. I knew people’s names from reading their writing online, but this was a time when photos were not as prevalent online, so I didn’t even necessarily know who they were until they were introduced at the podium.

And to be honest, I didn’t understand much of what was being discussed. Although I had absorbed quite a lot through public resources, what I had seen was a tiny piece of the puzzle. The ELO meeting felt like diving into the deep end of a pool, and the level of my comprehension was: well, this water I’m in seems to be blue.

I mention this because I think it’s important at events to find ways to welcome newcomers and to make them feel at ease, especially people who are shy like me. This is not an easy task. It’s not just a matter of adding a few social events to a schedule. I think that this is even harder with online events.

After a certain point, I thought, if I haven’t been able to find a community, maybe I can start one myself. I had a bunch of friends who wrote because I minored in creative writing in undergrad. I tried asking them to make an interactive story. I did this by asking them to use the command-line tool I had been using myself. Surprise, surprise, it didn’t work. Not a lot of writers are excited about using command-line tools, not because they’re not good at using technology, but because CLIs are a different beast, and they have their own learning curve.

It wasn’t until I made a graphical user interface for Twine that it took off. I think that speaks to the fact that the user experience for authors is crucial for a platform to succeed. Even so, it took years for Twine to find a community, and the community that emerged, honestly, had little to do with my own efforts.

The things people did with Twine were fascinating. They melded together the techniques of game design and narrative in really exciting ways. Horse Master by Tom McHenry appears at first to be a role-playing game. It shows you stats at the top of the screen about the “horse” that you’re raising, and the game appears to be about making those numbers get larger. But if you play Horse Master, you know that’s not the point of it at all. It’s in fact diametrically opposed to the idea that making numbers bigger is better.

I also saw people begin to push against the form of Twine itself. Silver and Gold by rosencrantz is a parallel narrative where you can choose to progress the left side or right side of the narrative independently. Together, these two sides tell a story. Something as simple as this wasn’t something I had ever considered when designing Twine. And finally, I saw people begin to push against the digital medium itself. With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine asks the player at certain points in the narrative to make markings on themselves.

The other thing I observed about the community that grew around Twine was it didn’t take itself terribly seriously, unlike the parser community that I was from. I think Glorious Trainwrecks was a website that a lot of Twine activity occurred at. You can probably guess from its name that its purpose was not to produce literary masterpieces. Its goal was for folks to create strange, interesting things.

I write that I think the Glorious Trainwrecks was a hub for where a lot of Twine activity occurred, but the truth is I don’t know, and the story of how this community formed isn’t mine to tell. I want to leave a space here for that part of the story, because I wasn’t present for it. I think there have been efforts to document the rise of this community, but I think there’s more work to be done.

I became aware of this community slowly and piecemeal. People would email me, for example, to ask me to fix a bug with Twine or add some capability. Much, much later, I discovered some of them were a little afraid of me. And I think they had good reason to be. Not that there’s anything scary about me, I hope, but because as soon as Twine became popular, I began feeling pressure.

I felt pressure to extract value from the community. The nicest version of this was the concept of a premium version of Twine, where people could optionally pay money for more features. There were plenty of other less nice versions of this. There was also pressure to extract value from Twine itself and, by proxy, myself. This mostly took the form of tech startups that suggested marrying Twine to their idea and somehow, getting rich together.

To all these ideas, I said no. Hopefully, this essay explains why I did this. But I also don’t want this to be just a congratulatory story: look at me giving away things for free! How good of me. Because things are more complex.

If I give Twine away, it means that massive corporations get to use it as well without compensating me in any sense. I suppose you can make the argument that I can say, “Twine is a good tool because big, important companies that we respect use it.” But I’m not convinced.

I can console myself by telling myself that a public library is open to you regardless of how rich or poor you are. You don’t have to show a tax return before you walk in. And a pen costs the same amount of money regardless of what you use it for. You pay the same price if you’re doing your school homework with it or you’re writing a blockbuster screenplay for Hollywood.

It gets a little more complicated, though, when corporations do more than simply use these tools to create things, but begin to repackage them and resell them. For example, AWS ElastiCache is essentially a repackaging of two open source projects, Memcached and Redis. ElastiCache is mostly a layer on top of these open source projects that makes it easier to use these open source projects inside AWS’s proprietary cloud service. There are a lot of AWS customers who find that useful. But as it turns out, open source projects don’t necessarily love that.

This past March, Redis changed how their licensing worked. They didn’t directly say that AWS and other cloud providers were stealing money from them, but they did say that people weren’t being fair. So Redis created the equivalent of having to show your tax return before you enter the library. Big corporations have to abide by one license to use Redis and regular people use a different, more permissive license. But this change scared a lot of people—not just big corporations. What else might they change later?

I’m not particularly afraid AWS is suddenly going to offer Twine as a service. I don’t think the people working at AWS even know what Twine is. But I do worry about the larger implications of what’s going on. There’s a theory right now, the dark forest of the Internet, which I believe has its origin in the The Three-Body Problem books. The idea is if a civilization becomes known by any other in the galaxy, they’re immediately annihilated because doing so is the only rational choice for the other civilizations. The existence of an alien civilization is too much of an existential risk. So the only way for a civilization to thrive is for it to hide in the forest of space.

Likewise, the metaphor of the dark forest internet is that in the face of LLM-generated content and surveillance capitalism, the public internet is beginning to diminish. We’re beginning to retreat into private spaces like Discord and newsletters.

If we believe a dark forest of the internet is possible and something we should work to prevent, then a dark forest of platforms is equally possible. If I believe that if my platform gets popular enough, AWS or Google will gobble it up or try to extract value from it, why should I build it?

Is hiding the only survival strategy? The dark forest metaphor tells us that’s true. But is it really the only way we can live? I don’t know. But I believe our community is full of smart, creative people, and I believe we can figure this out together.

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