Anna Anthropy’s queers in love at the end of the world is a provocative example of a brief game created using Twine, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories”. Anthropy’s game takes place in the last ten seconds of the world’s existence, forcing the player to make a series of decisions about how to spend the end of their life with their partner.

In a previous post on non-linear, interactive narratives, I speculated on the challenges of creating these narratives as well as designing the tools used to create them. Twine provides a particularly useful toolkit for creating hypertext-based non-linear narratives, that can be published directly to the web. Indeed, the app’s simplicity has yielded an entire community of creators who freely share their works at the Interactive Fiction Database.

We’ve recently begun to think about Pararchive as a means of orchestrating pieces of the web into some kind of narrative; Twine’s very visual narrative editor offers some clues as to how we might craft a simple, but expressive user experience for helping our communities construct their stories.

There’s a great critique of queers in love at the end of the world over at Rhizome, entitled Ten Seconds to Hypertext Oblivion. It’s worth a read and do try the game and let us know what you think in the comments below…