"Chance (re)Collections: Twine Games and Preservation on the Internet"

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Contents

Introduction

Methods

Analysis

Conclusion

Afterword

References

Appendix A: Primary Dataset

Appendix B: Ludography

About the Author

Afterword

This project was initially completed in May 2019. Some months after, Leon Arnott’s website was updated, and in the process, the Twine archive’s page disappeared. In an instance of meta-archival chance, it remains viewable through the WM, with snapshots as recent as September 23, 2019. The link to download the spool is also archived there, meaning that, at least for the moment, these games live on. However, Arnott (n.d.-a) forecasts this precarity on the “Links” page of his own site: “[The WM] is, to me, one of the fundamental services of the Web - a second chance to recover vanished web pages, or get a glimpse of the past. When, not if, we lose this service will be a tragic day.”

Now, the non-operational archive link forwards to an archive of another kind—a repository of Arnott’s (2014) own creations, rather than the Twine collection it once housed. In the months between the original archive’s disappearance and the site’s update, however, the link hovered in digital limbo. Instead of an index of not-yet-forgotten games, users were greeted with a 404 error (Arnott, n.d.-b) and a sobering confession: “I am only a humble website... I can’t give you everything."