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PA: How much coding did you know before you jumped into this? How difficult was it to sort of hack Twine to make it look like you did?

SE-S: I knew some coding from playing around with Twine for my first game Penalties, as well as fumbling with Construct 2 during a 48-hour game jam, but that’s the extent of my coding experience. Luckily Twine has a unique community where there is a plethora of tutorials and resources online, and that really helped me understand how it can function in my favour. I find with Twine a lot of the work had already been done for me in terms of coding, and it’s a matter of tweaking it to make it work with the visions I have for my games.

PA: Twine is sort of an intersection of many different cultures online. Do you think it belongs more firmly in the realm of academic art or gaming?

SE-S: It belongs to everyone! What’s beautiful about Twine is that it’s free, and though it’s widely advertised as an interactive text maker, I’ve seen designers do some incredible work with audiovisual components that are just as effective as HTML5 games, for example. I’m currently curating a project that is essentially an anthology of Twine games made by various designers and writers, and it’s astounding to see each of them submit games that are so different from each other even though they’re all working within a singular theme. It’s a platform that can be as simple or as complicated as you’d like, and if you’re able to type words with a keyboard, you can make it do so much for you.