The UnBEARable Lightness of Punning
Or: Comedy in Twine & IF, via Xalavier Nelson Jr’s Screw You Bear Dad!
I’ve discussed at length before how much I love Xalavier Nelson Jr’s funny, sad Twine game, Screw You, Bear Dad!, so I won’t go over all of that again. However, I will say I thought it was a good game to bring to Hello Words, because firstly it makes excellent use of Twine’s functions to convey both movement and humour, and secondly, Nelson has made a series of informative post mortems about the process of writing the game. Unlike most game post mortems, it’s less about design (although that does come into it, of course) and more about the craft of writing, the nuts and bolts of transferring ideas from brain to screen to reader.
Before Hello Words, I asked Nelson his thoughts about humour in Twine, and he told me: “Twine has become a small genre unto itself, with a certain set of standards and tropes that players can take for granted. Breaking this pattern, as with most comedy, will not only surprise players, but delight them!” This is certainly the case with Bear Dad. Twine is often used for sprawling, poetic, non-linear pieces, sometimes more like experimental digital art than interactive stories. Even when it is used for more traditional narrative, comedy is much rarer in Twine games than in, say, parser adventures. Bear Dad subverts this idea with a pun-filled and poigniant story more concerned with exploration of character than of virtual space.
Naturally, this led us to consider some of our favourite comedic games, a conversation which spilled onto the Interactive Fiction UK Facebook group. As well as the previous session’s Wizard Sniffer, other favourites included Hunger Daemon and The Lost Pig.
Finally, new member Richard was able to introduce a text game tool I wasn’t familiar with, Adrift, and provided a quick tour of pros (it’s completely GUI based — everything is selected from dropdowns, like Quest only moreso, so no coding ability is required) and cons (it can’t run its outputs straight into a browser, thereby making it more difficult to share work once you’ve made it).
As exciting things are currently happening for the NVA, we unfortunately no longer have a space to use there, but we were able to check out Broadway across the road as a potential spot, and found it has suitable wifi and isn’t horribly busy on a Thursday evening, so future sessions will be held there (upstairs in the Mezzanine Bar which is generally quieter and has more seating & tables).
April 12th — Play session of “Creatures Such As We” by Lynnea Glasser (ChoiceScript) followed by discussion.
May 10th — Play session of “The Intercept” by Inkle Studios (Ink/Inky) followed by discussion.
We hope you’ll join us. Sign up via Eventbrite if you need a map to the new location.
