I recently learned that an online Twine jam was going to be happening this weekend. It’s a “Naked Twine Jam”, where all submissions must avoid using any CSS or Javascript modifications whatsoever:

Twine is also very easy to customize. However, while visual modifications and external modifications can produce lots of interesting results, they aren’t at all necessary to tell compelling stories.

For this event, we’ll all work within the creative restriction of using only the basic Twine program with no CSS or Javascript modifications. If you don’t know what that means, then don’t worry about it! Just download the program here and start playing around with it.

I haven’t actually completed many Twine projects I’m proud of, but all of the ones I’m deeply invested in involve a LOT of javascript plugins and CSS modifications. My favorite thing about Twine is the versatility you can achieve through unusual text behaviors and page layouts. A lot of my favorite Twine games ever would be impossible without javascript plugins. Breakfast on a Wagon With your Partner, for example, could not exist without the cycling link macro. All I want is for all my friends to become insanely powerful would not have the same crescendo without the targeted CSS macro. Anhedonia has important audio and visual elements that would not be possible without javascript and CSS. Without those elements, it would be a completely different kind of art.

I have no problem with the idea of a “naked” Twine jam– in fact, I’m already participating– but it is making me realize how much I value customization and specialization in Twine projects.  I’m fascinated by words changing and behaving uniquely on-screen. I like cycling links, unfurling sentences, etc. Not all of my projects use these kinds of behaviors, but I really like them, both in my work and in others’. I like that Twine allows authors to add this functionality.

Fact is, when you add new behaviors to onscreen text, you can actually say new things. I recently met with another writer who’s interested in new ways of presenting nonlinear narratives, and during that conversation we talked a little bit about how the artistic possibilities of hypertext are unrealized by the tools and platforms people have been using to consume digital writing. When you add cycling text to a page, you can actually communicate in new ways that you could never could before. When you add “unfurling” text, the possibilities for communication expand again. To make an awkward analogy, when it comes to the communication of ideas, these features are less like fonts and more like entirely new words.

Twine is special because it’s accessible, but it’s also special because it can be incredibly complex. You can make Twine behave in extremely specific and unusual ways, which in turn allows you to say very specific and unusual things that can’t be quite said in any other way. If I’d been writing Swan Hill in linear form as a short story, I could have communicated the Chancellor’s inward-looking attitude in a number of different ways, but I couldn’t have possibly communicated it in exactly the way that I ended up doing so. And I have the replace and revise macros to thank for that. That’s the kind of thing that I value about Twine.

Nevertheless, I’m enjoying the challenge of making a game without CSS or javascript modifications of any kind. I’ll probably go back after the jam and spruce it up before hosting it on my own website, but until then, the story looks a little like this: