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Conclusion
Anxious Ephemera
Twine’s embodiment of digital impermanence—sometimes at the hands of its own creators—points to the essentially social nature of Internet-based preservation. In this capacity, “online archives can only be made stable, reliable, and accessible over the long term by human labor. . . . Communities must work to conserve their digital artifacts and rituals, or risk losing them to the digital’s proclivity for ephemerality and loss” (De Kosnik, 2016, p. 30). Of the games discussed in this analysis, those still accessible remain so largely thanks to the work of individuals and organizations that have observed this digital proclivity and responded accordingly.
These responses stem from the larger sense of anxiety that fuels digital preservation work. When amateur Internet archivists spoke to their motivation for committing such a vast amount of time and labor to the effort of digital preservation, they cited “their fear of loss, their anxiety over digital ephemerality, and their suspicion that if they do not save a community’s cultural works, those works will vanish entirely” (De Kosnik, 2016, p. 131). This self-awareness of the ephemerality of a community’s own creations fosters the essential urgency behind preservation on the margins—the knowledge that without action, these works will become another casualty of the digital dark age.
Further, the fact that unconventional media like Twine encounters a lack of mainstream concern for and/or effort toward preservation—in stark contrast to attitudes regarding more perceived-legitimate artifacts like print media and film—constructs a value judgement. A simple explanation might suggest that Twine’s ephemerality is a direct result of 1) the preservational unruliness of its creations and 2) the lack of large-scale interest the medium received. While these observations are accurate, the rationalization fails to interrogate why these issues have not garnered further attention. The logics of whose creations are retained and whose are lost “operate to produce differential valuations such that people can be seen as either eligible for personhood and thereby worthy of social life or ineligible and so worthy of social death” (Ribero & Licona, 2018, p. 154). Preservation is important not because we must be able to fit all media into a normative notion of archival status, or because Twine games must also bend to the expectations of the mainstream gaming industry, but because preservation is an act of evaluation—of saying, There is something here that is worth keeping.
The Problem with Preservation
The precarity and complexity of these games’ preservation also points to a question of access. If a game is so buried that finding a way to play it becomes a prerequisite activity to the game itself, who will end up being able to play the game? Who will have the skills, knowledge, and time to find a game, and who will not? Many individuals are not familiar with the WM, and Leon Arnott’s page is not the most readily available site among Google search results. Generally, when someone searches for a Twine game, the top results are the host site (if it exists), a database entry or two (such as the Interactive Fiction Database), and some journalistic and/or fan coverage on third-party websites. And even playthroughs, which are often near-complete in scope, cannot serve to replace the game itself. Because of Twine’s hypertextual, networked construction, any attempt to transfer games to a linear medium—such as a YouTube Let’s Play or a transcription in merritt k’s book Videogames for Humans (2015)—will lose the interactive quality that is essential to their medium. When it comes to Twine, “how we preserve our games [is] just as important as how we play them” (DeNiro, 2019).
And Twine preservation, in particular, comes wrapped in a variety of logistical and ethical concerns. Many Twine games were and are made free-to-play, and the issue of monetary support offers a broader discourse on the valuation of creative work. Websites like itch.io allow independent game developers to upload their creations for purchase, often at flexible—and considerably low, compared to mainstream titles—price points. If someone preserves and shares a game that is or was originally available for purchase, what does it mean to make it available for public access? How can valuing creators and their labor—particularly in creative circles like Twine’s, where many of the individuals are part of marginalized communities that might already experience economic disadvantage—be balanced with the nature of digital, non-professional archiving that usually (if not always) makes the media available for free? And regardless of compensation, what of creators who would prefer that their games disappear, or who consider ephemerality as a core feature of their creative output? Whose wishes should take precedence in the realm of digital cultural memory?
Further, Twine preservations often occur at the micro-level. Rather than preserving a vast swathe of games as a group, the archiving requests on the WM or downloads and subsequent reuploads of game files on various sites save individual games, one at a time. Internet preservation, and Twine preservation in particular, is an opt-in process: “if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it,” and even then, “saving something and preventing its destruction are not entirely the same thing” (LaFrance, 2015).
A Memory of Eventual Ghosts
A simple fact: Twine games are disappearing. All signs indicate that they will continue to do so. Between unruly formats, a lack of mainstream attention, and—in the case of creators like Porpentine and merritt k—intentional disappearance, a complete Twine archive is, even now, an impossibility. So why struggle against the inevitable pull of digital ephemerality? The observations and interrogations of this research provide at least a few reasons.
First and foremost, the inherent value of diverse stories cannot be understated. These Twine games, as vessels for queer voices and beyond, have the potential to serve as both windows into lives and experiences totally unknown to the reader/player, and as mirrors through which readers/players can see themselves and their worlds reflected and affirmed (Bishop, 1990). As Twine games’ digital transience takes hold, these unique windows and doors are sealed once more. While not every game can be saved, the rare few that are retained in full are able to keep their gateways open to those who seek them.
Further, digital preservation is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. While preservation on the level of Depression Quest undoubtedly has its benefits, it is not the only valuable course of action. The collected remnants of Twine games—whether a result of partial or even incidental preservation—tell their own stories. And even when core elements and context are lost, the remaining shadows realize preservational anxieties, affirming that content on the digital margins remains online at the mercy of these inadvertent assemblages.
What’s more, these remnants leave a message for the future: something was here, once. Something was here, and humans held onto it—even if only a few, if only for a time—because it mattered to them. In this sense, preservation is also an act of recognition, of honoring these digital lives. By preserving even the barest elements of Twine games, communities gather the remnants of lost creations in their hands and outstretch them to the inevitable future. When these games disappear, their stories go silent. But preservation speaks. Preservation says, Something was here. And it mattered. And we remember.
Practical Suggestions for Impossible Futures
The games featured in this paper offer a snapshot of how and why Twine preservation occurs, pose complex questions about the impact of this preservation on marginalized creators and communities, and showcase the impact of various methods of distribution on digital longevity. In the end, Twine games may indeed be destined for disappearance. However, there is value in making efforts to preserve these artifacts, even imperfectly. To that end, the observations throughout this paper indicate some preliminary best practices. In this final section, I offer a number of strategies for the preservation and dissemination of digital content on the margins.
Perhaps most evident is the need for sharing. This applies to both creators and players; talk about the games you make, the games you love, the games not enough people are talking about. Seek “ways to honor the labor done by game designers, ways to support their work, that are less tied to profits and institutionalized power” (Jones, 2018, p. 53), but continue to hold space for the complexities that inevitably arise. More broadly, digital games preservation will benefit most from creative thinking wherein creators and players alike work outside of traditional structures and pursue unconventional solutions for the challenging questions that enshroud artifacts like Twine.
In existing records, redundancy is key; the most reliable preservations occur when multiple copies of the game exist in multiple spaces. This includes cross-posting—for instance, offering a game on a personal site as well as a host site like itch.io—as well as indexing—requesting the pages to be saved on the WM or submitting the file to the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s Interactive Fiction Archive (“Upload to the IF Archive,” n.d.). If digital preservation is a fundamentally social process, Twine preservation relies on its active community for continued existence. Even avenues with less retention of the game’s text, like listings on the Interactive Fiction Database, leave footprints which aid in tracing a game’s manifestations across time. And in the face of the seemingly insurmountable impermanence of the Internet, our best hope is leaving as many footprints as possible.