Wednesday, October 12, 2016

If Comp '16: Twine Games

The next game up on my personalized list is "Thaxted Havershill And the Golden Wombat" and yeah, I can't be bothered. I think it's time to be honest with myself and say that I don't enjoy Twine games. There's only a handful I've ever played that didn't feel like a chore (Horse Master, and Birdland jump to mind). For the most part, I find them to be tedious and the presence of in-paragraph hyperlinks to be disruptive to flow. The proliferation of entries made in Twine over the past few years have been a serious roadblock in my playing and judging of the Comp. There's too many, I don't enjoy them, and I struggle to evaluate them.

That's not to say that Twine is bad, or that games made with it are inherently deficient. They're just not for me... or should I say I'm not for them. While playing a CYOA I want something beyond just storypaths. I enjoy gamebooks because they have to marry CYOA structure with game mechanics and make those mechanics work on paper. I find that challenge invigorating. Pure CYOA lacks that appeal - at least, in the context of the Comp. I'm a parser guy though and through. I come to the Comp to see what people are doing with that specific format and for a while now CYOA and Twine have gotten in the way of that.

So I'm going to abstain from playing or voting on any more Twine or pure CYOA games. (Unless they have a lot of great buzz. I don't want to miss out on something great just because it isn't in my preferred format.) Not only will this allow me to focus on the games I'm passionate about, but also cut down on the daunting number of entries in this year's competition.

Apologies to any authors of these games. I promise, it's not you, it's me.

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