Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction allows the reader to make choices that take them down different narrative paths. The classic example in print literature is the Choose Your Own Adventure Books published by Bantam Books in the 80s and 90s. There are also many, many examples of digital interactive fiction where the reader clicks on a choice or has a limited number of commands that they can type in to move the narrative forward. The classic example here is Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure game written by Will Crowther.

The line between story and game is often blurred in interactive fiction, perhaps because the reader becomes the main character and a positive resolution of the plot is akin to winning a game.

A note on using images in Twine:

When using Twine with students, you may want to stick to just text. The power of the tool is in providing the interactive links that allow the reader to make choices. If you want to "level up" and include images, you'll need to figure out how to host them.

• The simplest option is to create a folder that contains all the images you want to use in the story and the HTML file for the published story. Wherever you want an image to appear, use <img src="Name of file.jpg"> where "Name of file.jpg" is the actual name of the file. Then students can give you the whole folder, either on a flash drive or by creating a zip file of the folder and sharing that by email, LMS, etc.
• If you want to be able to share the story online using a service like Philomela, all of your images will have to be hosted somewhere online. I tried this with Google Drive, Google Photos, Flickr, and DropBox, none of which seemed to work. Finally, I found success by hosting the images on Imgur. That allows me to get a direct link to the image which I include in the code. For example, <img src="https://i.imgur.com/ep9vWqU.png">. The only problem is that Imgur is not intended for use by students younger than 13.
• You can control the size of an image by including width and height in your code. For example, <img src="https://i.imgur.com/ep9vWqU.png" width=300 height=200>. Otherwise it shows up as whatever size the original image is.
• By the way, it is poor form to just Google search for an image and then link directly to wherever that image is online. You are using another site's bandwidth to host content for your story. Also, the owner of the site hosting the image may take it down or change it.