44pp colour A5 booklet about text adventures, crosswords, gamebooks and more.
Booklet, colour, 148 x 210mm
Overview
A choose-your-path exploration of text games, puzzles, crosswords and game books.
Background
This exploration of text games, puzzles, crosswords and game books was inspired by Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games, a massive book that I enjoyed enormously and gave me a lot of ideas. Most of these I didn’t have the inclination or technical ability to see through, but one of them seemed within my grasp – an interactive non-fiction essay, similar to a choose-your-own-adventure book. I had previously used the Twine software a story in my 52 Murders project and I was able to employ it for the writing and structure of this essay. As someone who likes computers and books, it struck me that my history with text games felt quite different to what was in Reed’s book. He presented a comprehensive study of the form, whereas this little booklet is really just a web of interconnected personal reflections.
It was originally going to be a newsletter, perhaps with some anchored links that would let you jump around the text in a vaguely interactive way, but I started mapping it out and everything got more complex than I intended. Every new point created two more avenues to pursue and the hydra was escaping my grasp. After some time away, I picked it back up, rationalised the structure and finished writing it.
The process of translating it from a clickable HTML file to something I could typeset was handled by a Twine template called Chapbook, written by Chris Kilmas. From there, I typeset the pages and chunked out an A5 booklet. I made a few leaflets by hand, only to realise that there were too many mistakes in there. I went through another round of editing, before sending them off to a printer.
I hope people like it. If it makes anyone buy Reed’s book, I’d consider it a job well done. I still have a few more ideas for interactive text that may or may not come to fruition, but after this I think I’m just going to keep things linear for a while.