Adventures in Hypertext: Twine
For this exercise, we used the digital tool Twine to remediate a folktale into a digital choose-your-own-adventure form. I chose a Malagasy tale called “Koera le perroquet” (Koera the Parrot), which is a story I’ve also remediated in other ways. We often use the tale as the basis for a theater activity at my French immersion summer camp, and I’ve seen numerous groups of campers turn the story into a skit, costumes, narration, and all. I thought that extra layer of remediation would make this text a fun one to work with, and I was also curious to see whether this choose-your-own-adventure writing activity might be one I could bring back to camp with me this summer.
My main takeaway from the exercise was surprise at how much the text needed to be adjusted to work in a choose-your-own-adventure format. Although the original story is narrated in the third person, I had to pick a character’s perspective to tell this version of the story from, and I had to adjust the tone of the story to align with that character’s perspective. Since the story doesn’t include any natural decision points, I also had to invent a series of decisions for the narrator to make and a series of consequences for making the “wrong” choice. Ultimately, I think the choices I made allow the story to stay faithful to its original version, but it would have been easy to transform the tale into a completely different work given how much creativity this remediation process required.
Given my experience, I would absolutely be interested in trying the activity out at camp this summer, both with this folktale and others. A further challenge might be transferring it out of the digital realm and into a paper-and-pencil activity, which would eliminate all of the conveniences of the digital tool, but may also produce a more gratifying, tactile, final product.
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