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Analysis
Who Gets Saved?: On Access and Anxiety
In many ways, the digital lifespan of these games points to what Matthew Kirschenbaum (2013) characterizes in “The .txtual Condition” as the “partial, peculiar, often crushingly arbitrary and accidental way that cultural records are actually preserved” (para. 37). When it comes to Twine, it often appears to be a matter of chance or virality whether or not (and to what degree) a game is spared from digital extinction. Perhaps the best-known Twine game, Depression Quest, is also one of the best-preserved—largely thanks to its viral role in 2014’s Gamergate controversy. Google’s “Trends” page indicates that at the height of its fame in August 2014, no other Twine game3 or creator4 came remotely close to its notoriety. As one would imagine, Depression Quest is relatively well documented. It has its original host site, a Steam purchase/download entry, various functional WM entries, extensive media coverage, and over 50 playthroughs and reviews on YouTube. Many of these partial preservations (media coverage, playthroughs, reviews, etc.) occur inadvertently, in the course of some other action. The playthroughs, for example, are generally not intentional acts of preservation. Instead, players and journalists are following an impulse to contribute thoughts and reactions to a cultural artifact, and the preservation inherent in their medium is incidental; “[access is] duplication, duplication is preservation, and preservation is creation—and recreation” (Kirschenbaum, 2013, para. 16).
Twine games are not necessarily imbued with a built-in concern for digital longevity. In this sense, Anthropy’s parallel of the medium to zine culture is appropriate. The focus is on creating something strange, countercultural, unconventional, subversive, queer, critical, or otherwise new. As Twine creator Porpentine explains, “[Twine] succeeded precisely because of its violence—because it was suited for guerilla warfare—a cheap, disposable weapon of underdogs” (as cited in Harvey, 2014, p. 97). This points to what many creators have found to be Twine’s biggest strength: the culture of radical creation that has arisen around it.
And so, the focus is not on creating something that is temporally stable and conventionally preservable. This is evident in games like Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone, a complex and lengthy Twine piece about depression and suicide, which was available to download for a single day. Thanks to individual efforts, players can still access the game through various means—a preserved download link on the WM, as well as forums where users have reuploaded the HTML file—in part because the creator, Porpentine (2014), had forewarned them on Tumblr: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. . . . This game will live through social means only. This game will not be around forever because the people you fail will not be around forever. They are never coming back.” In this case, Porpentine harnesses time as an anxious reminder of ephemerality, and thereby a catalyst for urgency. One day this will be gone, so you must care about it now, in the present tense. The focus is on creating something unique and engaging in its immediacy; if a game lives beyond that moment, it is only because of the people who engage with it. But as Twine games continue to suffer neglect of preservation, where does this leave the content for anyone approaching from beyond its imagined lifespan—those who cannot make such a narrow window of access?
What Remains: Experience and Identity in Digital Decay
Even when digital preservation does occur, the methods available to online communities are not infallible. The game Naked Shades offers one such example. It was designed to be “the first online multiplayer Twine ever made” (Lamia Queenz, 2013), harnessing real-time player information to create an interactive experience. Playing the game requires other players—not so difficult amid its initial release, when a group of friends or classmates might be able to play locally, but more difficult over time and essentially impossible now, when the host website is unavailable and even the preserved HTML file—which ostensibly imparts the game’s original text, formatting, and content—only allows a single player to progress through about four screens of gameplay before they reach a point that they cannot move past without the multiplayer element intact. Despite having what ought to be the closest artifact to the original upload, the complete game is lost to digital decay.
Other forms of preservation are more innately incomplete. Reviews and journalistic coverage, for instance, tend to include screenshots, quotes, and some kind of reference to the game’s overall plot and play experience, but leave the reader/player to discover much of the game’s secrets for themselves—a difficult endeavor, of course, once the game is no longer available. Databases and articles, which similarly provide little more than the game’s title, creator, a brief summary, and photos, offer a limited record of a game’s existence. Kim’s Story, for instance, was originally available through Dropbox, a file hosting service that allows users to share download links to their files. Now, however, the link only offers a generic note ("Error (404)," n.d.): "We can't find the page you’re looking for.”
So, what is left? An entry on freeindiegam.es—containing the title, creator, a screenshot, and a semi-cryptic quote from a now-unavailable webpage (Cavanagh, 2012)—and a single student’s blog post for a University of Maryland graduate course on digital humanities (Kaczmarek, 2013). If not for Arnott’s inclusion of this game in his spool, these would be all we have.
What is lost? The writing, for one thing. Without the game itself, all we have of Kim’s Story is three excerpts. The first:
When I was a young girl, I was a member of the Boy Scouts.
The Boy Scouts was my first experience with gamification.
Here’s a rope.
Show me what knots you know.
The second: “Of course, girls aren’t supposed to be Boy Scouts at all. I’ll forgive them for making me be one, though. They didn’t know. They just wanted what was best for me.” And the third:
Do you think I’m pathetic?
Yes No
Without the game itself, we are also at the mercy of the unwitting preservationists. Katie Kaczmarek’s (2013) post on Kim’s Story for her UMC course is insightful insofar as it offers a sense of the general arc of the game, but it overlooks an arguably essential part of the story. “She never really explains why she was a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout,” Kaczmarek writes. “As a reader, I just felt that I was missing some kind of fundamental background information about her family—and about her, to know why she put up with the activity when she clearly didn’t enjoy it.” The key, in fact, is that the creator is alluding to her own experience as a trans woman—information which can now only be confirmed with one rabbit hole or another of Google and WM searches.5 Still, even given only the text of the game itself, the trans narrative is evident. Therein lies the issue, however; we will not always have a game’s original text. If Kim’s Story were not fully preserved, we would be left only with Kaczmarek’s limited account of the game. Something is lost in that imagined digital decay—and the creator’s identity, often so central to Twine pieces, is ostensibly overwritten by the few who (accurately or otherwise) remember the piece.
Killing the Archive: The Disappearance of merritt k
One case study of particular note is that of merritt k, who gained prominence as a game developer for her early work in Twine. She published a book about Twine, received multiple awards for her games, and was even brought on as the NYU Game Center’s first-ever artist-in-residence (Woods, 2016). Now, however, she has shifted paths. She makes her living as a writer, editor, and podcaster, active on social media but with a much quieter news media presence. Along with that shift came the evolution of her personal website, and the devolution of her Twine games’ availability. When she first began putting out games—starting in 2012, after coming across Twine in Rise of the Videogame Zinesters—they were made available on her personal website. As she transitioned away from the medium around 2014, the games departed from her site but remained available on her itch.io profile (k, 2017a), alongside various zine projects, from 2013 to sometime between 2017 and early 2018. During that time, she gradually decreased the number of games available and finally deleted her profile altogether in the latter end of 2018.
In general, this process happened quietly. In a 2017 interview, k (2017b) addressed the decreasing availability: “In terms of killing a lot of the archive, a lot of it felt personal in a way that I was uncomfortable with. I used to be freer with the things I shared with the internet [until] around 2014, when organized hate campaigns—stuff like Gamergate—got taken to a new level. Not that those kinds of things didn’t happen previously, but being personal online was a much more dangerous proposition after that for a lot of people.” Despite their impact, many of k’s Twine games are now lost to time or relegated to the hard drives of those who downloaded the files prior to their removal. The remnants of the games—three in particular—offer illustrative examples of the effects of preservation in action.
One such game is (ASMR) Vin Diesel DMing a Game of D&D Just for You. Like the title describes, it is a quick, empathetic game about action-film star Vin Diesel comforting the player by running a short, one-on-one session of Dungeons & Dragons for them. The game was free on itch.io, but only as a download—and without an in-browser play option, the WM could capture only the listing for the game, not the game itself. Fortunately, YouTube playthroughs come to the (partial) rescue. A number of Let’s Players have uploaded playthroughs of the game, perhaps in part for its clickbait-worthy title. As a result, we have multiple playthroughs of the game to reference, although the game remains unavailable for actual play unless a third party reuploads the file elsewhere in the future.
Pivoting thematically, k also created a game called Consensual Torture Simulator. In her own words, it is “a compact text game about hurting someone who wants it” (k, 2013). It was available on k’s itch.io for pay-what-you-can starting at $3. While that paywall is part of the reason the WM was unable to archive it, when the game was available, the payment feature meant that k was able to profit from her labor at a time when many Twine creators were not being paid for their work. During its lifespan, the game spawned a number of journalistic pieces about its noteworthy—if explicit—content. All that remains now is the itch.io and Interactive Fiction Database listings and half a dozen online articles covering it. In terms of the actual content, gameplay, and writing, there remains very little at all—just one text-based walkthrough of the game that features 11 partial screenshots (TamTams, 2013). At this point, it seems this game, too, is lost.
Slightly more encouraging is the preservation of one of k’s earlier games, Brace. This game was only ever hosted on k’s personal website and is one of very few of her games to be successfully, functionally archived on the WM. The game was only archived because the Electronic Literature Organization requested it specifically, which is worth noting; many of k’s other games have been excluded from the WM, presumably by request. The game was also preserved by Leon Arnott in his spool, meaning that we have not one, but two backups—as well as some media coverage and other partial preservations. However, these retentions pose their own questions. If, as k stated, she removed games that were personal to the point of discomfort, should that decision be respected regardless of the preservation instinct? If so, how can we justify other creators’ (e.g., authors of print books) inability to totally retract a text they no longer wish to circulate? In either case, how do we construct a system of preservation which balances the value of preservation with the weight of authorial desire, comfort, and even safety?
[5] As an example: I searched “‘kim moss’ transgender”, which led me to a post by Mattie Brice (http://www.mattiebrice.com/category/criticism/), which mentions Moss in passing and links to a blog post she made. Since the post was on her Tumblr blog (under the name Kim Delicious), which is no longer online, I searched the blog on the WM. By chance, scrolling through the archived page from March 10, 2014 (https://web.archive.org/web/20140310155721/http://abstractkimbolism.tumblr.com/), revealed a post titled “Memories Brought Forth By The Word ‘Dialogue’” in which she describes an article she wrote and a man who responded to it, and in which she includes the self-referential phrase, “It was a cis dude, and there was very much the feeling of, ‘Oh, a trans woman said something, time for cis dude to step in and tell her why she’s wrong.’” The same search led me to a page on the personal site of Andi McClure, a game developer who has also done work in Twine, which lists games by trans creators (https://data.runhello.com/tdov/) and includes Kim’s Story at the top of the record.