According to Salter, Twine, released in 2009, has provided a new platform for game designers of diverse backgrounds to create “non-typical” games and has highlighted the concept that games have the potential to “increase empathy and create emotional connections.” In addition, we can see these aspects of Twine games in “Cactus Blue Hotel” and “Will Not Let Me Go”. Firstly, Salter states that Twine is a code free environment and therefore people with no programming background can be the creators of these games. As a result, this allows the Twine community to have a different group of creators with diverse backgrounds in comparison to the main-stream and homogeneous gaming community dominated by white males. Consequently, the concepts and themes of twine games are “non-typical” and “not clearly goal-oriented, and instead place emphatic development at the center of play”. Salter also states that there are some characteristics that are shared between twine games which includes personal voice or autobiographical influence, limitation of choice, dark color palettes, limited imagery, and use of internal monologues and dreamscapes. I believe that the games “Cactus Blue Hotel” and “Will Not Let Me Go” have some of these characteristics that are intrinsic to twine games.
“Cactus Blue Hotel” is about three friends that are driving through the desert on their way to California, for their last hooray together before they start a new chapter of their lives and go to college. While driving they ended up stumbling on a hotel, and decided to spend the night there.However, they soon found out it is not a regular hotel when the hotel’s cactus sign bloomed a blue neon light flower and the hotel appeared more lively afterwards. Dean, a character in the story, described the hotel as a place “where people never got tired” and “a place you can just stay put and do nothing”, but they discover that it is essentially a trap. On a representational level, this hotel represents a place where you can get trapped in because you want to escape and get away from your problems. In addition, the main character realizes that all people have problems that they want to escape from, for example, Lex doesn’t seem to have the money to pay to study and live at NYU and Becky is having relationship problems with her boyfriend. While on an evocative level this hotel can represent a dangerous mindset that people may have, if they want to escape the realities of life. They might let their entire lives go pass them without moving forward and they end up stuck in the same position for a long time. We can see this through the hotel guests. Some of them have been stuck in the hotel for ages, for example, when the band member asked “we made it through Y2K?”, it definitely highlighted how much time he had been stuck there at the hotel.
Firstly, this game is limited in the choices the player can make which is a characteristic common to Twine games. It really only follows one main story-line until the end. The choices that you make mostly, are mostly related to the emotional response of the main character and the things that she might say. Therefore, although there is not a lot of choice, I ended up building an emotional connection with the main character because I felt that I was her while playing the game. It is also because of the personal voice used in the game. The game was written in the perspective of the main character and therefore the personal pronoun “I” was used a lot. Secondly, I believe that this game places emphatic development at the center, but also includes elements of it being goal-orientated. The story made me remember when I was a teenager and how intimidating it could be leaving high school, because you do not know exactly what is in store for you at college or any of your future endeavors. However, the game also has the player do specific tasks before they can move forward in the game, for example, going to the shed. At some points you can get stuck in the game, if you are not entirely sure how to find the shed. Lastly, I thought the form of her twine was really amazing, because it was kind of like a mini map but in text. If the word “Room” was a hypertext link , you could click on it and it would take you to your room. So, it was pretty easy to navigate once you got the hang of it, which took me a little while.
“Will Not Let Me Go” had some similar characteristics to “Cactus Blue Hotel” for example, limitation of choice and the game places emphatic development at the center of the game. “Will Not Let Me Go” was centered around the main character Fred, who has Alzheimer’s disease, and the game features many excerpts of his life during the different stages of his Alzheimer’s disease. For example, the first excerpt was at his wife’s Virginia’s funeral, but he didn’t know it was his wife’s funeral. Since the story is from his perspective, I also did not know that it was his wife’s funeral until at the end of that scene when the young man next to him said “C’mon dad.” Firstly, I believe that the limitation of choice forces the player to experience Alzheimer’s disease. In this game, the choices that you make have no direct impact on the main plot of the story-line, therefore I had no choice but to follow Fred’s story and go through his life with him. I even got really frustrated when he was looking for his glasses;he was looking everywhere for them and then he went outside and got lost . As a result, I feel that by limiting our choices, I was forced to go through all the motions and emotions of having Alzheimer’s disease which lead me to feel empathy for people who have to go through this disease. In addition, I think the form of the of the twine game emphasized how scattered a person with Alzheimer’s disease could feel because the excerpts were not in any sort of chronological order, they were kind of all over the place.
To conclude I believe that both “Cactus Blue Hotel” and ““Will Not Let Me Go” both have characteristics of the twine genre proposed by Anatasia Salter in her paper.
Works Cited:
“Playing at Empathy: Representing and Experiencing Emotional Growth Through Twine Games”