Matt w I have been planning to do that, thanks for the reminder!
What a good idea!
Sure, and that’s fine - but I absolutely think it would be of value to the Twine community, whether they consider themselves part of the IFsphere or not, to have some kind of archive system. At the moment, I suspect that somewhere between a third and two-thirds of all the Twine games being made will totally vanish within a few years. (This is a big enough problem even on IFDB. One thing I really wish IFDB would do better is to make people aware that the IF Archive exists and strongly recommend that they use it.)
The IFDB has a nice API. I think it would be possible to make a site where you could give it a URL to a twine page for it to add it to both the IFDB and the IF Archive.
And if they do get lost there’s a chance the web archive will preserve it.
I agree, but is this a problem that we can solve, as (from their point of view) outsiders?
When I learned how to properly download Twine stories, I started doing it. I’m keeping a collection of those as well as the rest of the IFSphere (wonderful word, that).
Of course, by the time I got to some, they were already offline. And others use images hosted elsewhere. My approach to this is, I don’t give a damn. If the author didn’t take the time to make something that could be preserved properly, I’ll just take the HTML file knowing that eventually the images and sounds it links to won’t be available any more.
I just scrap what I can from where I can find it. Generally speaking, if a certain game is necessary, you can ask me, I’m not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Whether the Twine community wants to or not, whether they like it or not, they have an archive of sorts in me.
Maybe we should agree on some way of deciding IFIDs for Twine games. Do they have some sort of unique identifier already?
Edit: I guess what I’m saying is it would be great if we got “Twine” to sign the Treaty of Babel.
The Treaty of Babel seems irrelevant to Twine, as far as I can tell. The purpose was “to make it much easier to write new tools for players in which the distinction of which design system created which story file is much less visible”. This does not seem useful or meaningful when games are easily played in a web browser, and they have a unique URL.
The world of interactive fiction is bigger than this particular forum and community, and it will not be controlled and neatly categorised however much it would be lovely for that to be the case. If IFDB users want to catalogue Twine games, it should be up to the users of IFDB to add games when they find them, rather than expect Twine users to change their behaviour to suit the norms of the IFDB community.
(Maybe it will then become a useful resource for those Twine users, and maybe then they’ll see the benefit in adding their own listings, but this is a human issue and won’t be solved with software or “treaties”)
Yeah…
All I meant was that it might be useful to have a unique ID for Twine games, just like there is for other types of games that are collected (by people…) on the IFDB. If I’m not mistaken you are asked to provide one when you enter a game there.
(The obvious way to do it, since there is no native id for twine games (right?), seems to use “TWINE-MD”, where MD is the (upper-case) hex MD5 hash of the file. And then keep that I’d even if the game is updated in new releases.)
What if there are multiple files?
FYI, one of the known problems with Twine is that the original author has basically abandoned it. There are various contenders to the throne, but there’s no particular person/group who could sign onto Treaty.
On a related note, I’ve never figured out what problem the ID number system is supposed to be solving.
Yeah I think an IFID for each Twine would be very helpful.
To play dfabulich’s advocate: what would it help with?
I haven’t thought this fully through, but:
If the Twine application generates a unique ID for each .tws file (a la Inform), which carries over into any playable HTML files generated, then that would be a good first step toward bibliographic durability. Whether those intersect with current or future tools I guess it would be difficult to say. On the other hand although there isn’t a uniform Twine community, there is actually a lot of “shop talk” on the Twine Google Group that draws in a lots of different types of people. But there’s a lot of tinkering with macros and CSS, so much so that Twine’s capabilities even a year ago are very different than what they are today, at least in terms of collective knowledge and making customizable stories. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that at some point in the future I think the archival needs of Twine will take more of a center stage in the Twine community, whereas now the abilities of what Twine can DO is kind of a moving target (at least for many non-advanced users/people not well versed in Javascript).
But having the IFID would be a platform to getting this conversation off the ground and figuring out what’s the best way to (self)-archive Twines.
Good game title.
- Wade
Actually he hasn’t, at least not any more. Here’s him talking at noshowconf last month about the development of Twine and his plans for version 2: twitch.tv/mitgamelab/b/461883451 (he starts around 5:15:00)
overview:
noshowconf.com/presentation/twin … ct-leader/
I sent Chris Klimas email after this thread, catching him up to what we’d discussed. Then I saw him at NoShowConf but we didn’t have a chance to talk it over.
Someone also pointed out philome.la/ , “Free Twine Hosting”. It seems to be just hosting (not search, not metadata, not mirroring). It may wind up tying into larger solutions, however.
FYI, just now noticed: through twitter.com/philomela_twine. Basically an automated tweet for every game that gets uploaded to this service, I think. Another way to get Twine games.
Fragmented much? 