My writing journey began when I was eleven years old, when I used to role-play on forums and other websites online. It's quite like Dungeons and Dragons, where each player has a character and interacts with other player's characters, but all text based and written out eloquently. I always pushed myself to write like my far-older friends I made online, who had three years of writing experience ahead of me. By reading and following in their example, my writing my "college-level" (as said by my english teacher) by the time I was in high school. I was published in a college literary magazine in eighth grade, which drove me to pursue writing as a career. I pursued a degree in English Writing and began studying all forms of writing outside of traditional creative writing, such as: creative non-fiction, cathartic writing (writing to heal), children's literature, and others. After being introduced to Twine during IndieCade 2014, I started taking my stories and creating interactive fictions in Twine. Feel free to download and play them!
Narrative Prototype: Exploring Player Empathy
A Twine piece, created as a prototype to test player empathy towards game characters. Instead of focusing on creating a strong narrative, I instead focused on creating interesting and believable choices. I recorded the choices made by the player to determine where their empathy lies with video game characters.
In this experiment, our protagonist, Kyla, speaks directly to the player. Unlike typical game characters, who follow the player's orders blindly, Kyla questions the player's decisions. This aims to create an empathic bond with the player, creating the illusion that she is a real person.
The prototype comments on players' desensitization towards greed and cruelty by testing whether their priority lies with keeping Kyla safe or acquiring loot., placing her in danger.
To Where the Rails Take Us
This is my second Twine-story, where I took a piece I wrote for my advanced creative writing class and made an interactive fiction out of it in Twine.