Twine is a text-based, interactive fiction platform created in 2009 by Baltimore-based writer, game designer, and web developer Chris Klimas. Twine runs on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, and is also available as a web app. It can be downloaded from twinery.org.

Interactive fiction means you, the reader, make choices about the direction of the narrative. Twine is a free, open-source program that allows helps you author a story whose twists and turns are determined by your reader choosing which links to click on in every panel of text. Easy to use, Twine requires no experience with coding. The Twine Cookbook shows you first how to create a simple, basic story, then how to add features and complexity. Twine is designed to work with text, but it is easy to add graphics audio and to customize the look and feel with CSS.

Authoring a narrative in Twine, you will see a graphic display that shows text passages as discrete elements and maps the relationships between them based on the links they contain. When you are ready, you can export your story as a small, stand-alone HTML file that can be opened in a web browser.

Game designers embraced Twine right from the beginning. The same capabilities that make Twine ideal for authoring interactive fiction also make it a powerful tool for creating text-based games. The simplicity of using Twine makes it especially appealing to individual game authors, the kind who create prosocial games for reasons other than commercial ones. The most influential is one you have probably never heard of, Depression Quest. This is a journey through the life of a person with clinical depression. Not very fun, really, but it made its own kind of history when it touched off the “Gamergate” harassment campaign against women in the video game industry in 2014. (Was that really less than ten years ago?) Another critically acclaimed title developed with Twine is Howling Dogs, a meditation on trauma and escape.

Thousands of interactive fiction works have been created with Twine; You can browse many of them on the Interactive Fiction Database and on itch.io.

The simplicity of use that makes Twine easy for an individual fiction or game author to work with – no need for a team of developers! – makes it a great platform to develop a gamified instruction activity. Because Twine games are published to HTML files, they can be distributed to students directly or published to interactive fiction repositories like IFDB. This flexibility makes them especially useful for asynchronous instruction. Here is an example of a gamified library instruction activity that guides players through a tour of library collections, subscriptions, services, and policies at the University of Denver: Aliens in the AAC.

Gamified instruction allows you to introduce concepts in a fun context that bypasses the anxiety and resistance students sometimes have toward formal instruction. Twine is a simple, easy-to use game authoring platform optimized for a busy instructor without a background in coding. Give it a try!