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Twine

Open-source tool for creating interactive, non-linear stories and games, widely used in the digital literature community for its simplicity, versatility, and accessibility to non-programmers
Evgenia Kleidona 2026-03-13

Explication

Created by web and game developer Chris Klimas, Twine was first released in 2009, initiating the Twine 1.x release series. Available only through download, Twine 1.x was gradually discontinued in 2014, with the newly launched Twine 2.x series introducing a fully web-based version alongside the desktop-based app (Klimas). Both current and older releases, along with detailed guides and a sample of Twine works, can be found on the official website, twinery.org.  

Twine is known for its user-friendly interface and ease of accessibility. Users can create non-linear Stories through an easy-to-use editor, in which they can add, edit, and link together blocks of text, called Passages. The interface also features a visual representation of the story layout called Story Map, a gridded area on which the passages are presented as square boxes while arrows leading from one passage to the next indicate the direction of the hyperlinks. Although Twine is optimal for the creation of simple hypertext and choice-based digital narratives, it allows for high customizability through CSS or Javascript, as well as the enrichment of the text with images or audio. The finalized story is exported as an HTML file, which can be easily distributed and accessed through any browser. 

According to Klimas, Twine’s popularity was not instant. Essentially, Twine hit the ground a few years after its release, when game-makers outside the mainstream scene discerned Twine’s potential to offer queer and alternative ways of making, playing, and distributing games (Klimas; Harvey 95). Klimas credits Anna Anthropy as the first indie game-maker to discover Twine. In Anthropy’s words, “Twine is this amazing queer and woman-orientated game-making community that didn’t even exist a year ago” (Ellison). Following Anthropy, Porpentine Charity Heartscape can be characterized as the creator that essentially maximized Twine’s popularity through her highly distinctive and often disturbing games. For Porpentine, Twine constitutes a revolution as much against capitalism as against the hegemony of parser-based games (“Creation Under Capitalism”). In addition to its advantages in terms of accessibility, usability, and versatility, Porpentine highlights Twine’s capacity to provide a space for personal and even confessional writing, as it relies mostly on natural language rather than code (“Creation Under Capitalism”). 

As Scott Rettberg notes, Twine games have adopted elements from traditional parser-based games, such as the use of second-person “you” to address the player character, spatial navigation through the narrative, and a sparse writing style (105). However, alongside these common elements, Twine games have also developed their own aesthetics, largely influenced by the distinctive style of the early proponents. Typical Twine characteristics, according to Anastasia Salter, include the use of dark imagery, dreamscapes and inner monologues, limited player agency as well as autobiographical points of reference. This last characteristic also points to the thematic orientation of many Twine games. Bringing to light personal and intimate experiences of their creators, a significant number of works center around issues related to identity, mental health, social marginalization, trauma and abuse.  

Twine is currently considered to fall under the broader umbrella of interactive fiction (IF), although this inclusion was not immediate or without resistance. For years, even well into the twenty-first century, a considerable number of IF authors and scholars considered anything non-parser to be outside the definition of IF (Porpentine). However, after the emergence of new platforms and mechanics, especially during the 2010s, the definition of interactive fiction was expanded by the IF community to include works that offer alternative ways of interaction (IFWiki; Montfort and Short 123-4). Catalytic to this development was the entrance of Porpentine’s howling dogs (2012) in two parser-dominated competitions, the Interactive Fiction Competition and the XYZZY Awards, achieving high-ranking and award-winning placements in both. From that year onward, the entries of Twine and other non-parser games started increasing significantly, eventually exceeding the number of parser games in the following years (Reed 520; Rettberg 105). This evolution is also evidenced by the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), with Twine entries surpassing all other authoring systems for the first time in 2014. The year is not accidental as, according to Salter and Moulthrop (7), this dramatic proliferation of Twine in the peak of and as a response to the Gamergate campaign showcases Twine’s influential role and long-lasting impact in the cultural scene.

See Also

  • Authoring Software - Tools for creators to design, develop, and publish interactive or multimedia stories without the need for advanced programming knowledge
  • Digital Narrative - Form of storytelling driven by algorithmic narrativity, inflected and mediated by computation, or the context of ubiquitous technological networks
  • Electronic Literature (e-lit) - Variety of born-digital genres and formats that engage the capabilities of computing, often investigating the materiality of our everyday interactions with digital media
  • Hypertext - Type of document comprised of interrelated textual nodes that are connected via associative links, facilitating non-linear traversal and reading
  • Interactive Fiction - Born-digital electronic literature where users navigate narrative and ludic elements by inputting textual commands or making choices
  • Literary Game - Media artifact that contains both ludic and literary elements
  • Player Agency - Degree to which users or players can influence the direction or outcome of a story or game, highlighting the interactive aspect of digital media

Works Referenced

Ellison, Cara. “Anna Anthropy and the Twine revolution.” The Guardian. April 10, 2023.  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog /2013/apr/10/anna-anthropy-twine-revolution. Accessed 28 Oct. 2025. 

Harvey, Alison. “Twine’s Revolution: Democratization, Depoliticization, and the Queering of Game Design.” G|A|M|E Games as Art, Media, Entertainment, vol. 1, no. 3, 2014, pp. 95-107. www.gamejournal.it/3_harvey/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025. 

IFWiki. https://www.ifwiki.org/Main_Page. Accessed 15 Sept. 2025. 

Interactive Fiction Database. https://ifdb.org/. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025. 

Klimas, Chris. “Twine: Past, Present, Future.” 21 June 2019. https://chrisklimas.com/blog/2019-06-21-twine-past-present-future/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025. 

Montfort, Nick, and Emily Short. “Interactive Fiction Communities: From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond.” Electronic Literature Communities, edited by Scott Rettberg et al., Center for Literary Computing, 2015, pp. 113-29. 

Porpentine. “Creation Under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution.” 2012. Nightmare Mode, https://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2012/11/25/creation-under-capitalism/. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025. 

Reed, Aaron. 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to Ai Dungeon. Changeful Tales Press, 2023. 

Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Polity Press, 2019. 

Salter, Anastasia. “Playing at Empathy: Representing and Experiencing Emotional Growth through Twine Games.” 2016 IEEE International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), IEEE, 2016. IEEE Xplore, DOI: 10.1109/SeGAH.2016.7586272. Accessed 25 Oct. 2025. 

Salter, Anastasia, and Stuart Moulthrop. Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives. Amherst College Press, 2021. 

Twine. twinery.org. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025.

Further Reading

Rettberg, Scott. “Digital Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction, edited by Joshua Miller, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 100-20. 

Ruberg, Bonnie. The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Duke UP, 2020. 

Short, Emily. “Choice-based Narrative Tools: Twine.” Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling. 10 Nov. 2012. https://emshort.blog/2012/11/10/choice-based-narrative-tools-twine/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2025.  

The Interactive Fiction Community Forum. The Interactive Fiction Community Forum, https://intfiction.org/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2025.

Cite This

Kleidona, Evgenia. "Twine." The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative, 2026. https://glossary.cdn.uib.no/terms/twine

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