At this point in the module, you have played multiple Twine games and have created your own interactive experience using the platform. Now, we’re going to use our critical disability knowledge and our personal experience to perform a platform analysis. Revisit “Accommodation Simulation” and/or your own Twine project. Consider the kind of games Twine allows players to make as well as the process of making those games.

Let the questions below guide your analysis:

Conclusion

As an interactive medium, videogames offer makers unique opportunities to elicit powerful emotional responses in players through choice. While we can consider these emotions in the traditional context of games (emotions of success, accomplishment over mastering and beating a game, joy at completing a difficult part of a game), we can also look at how emotions can challenge players by presenting experiences and situations not usually portrayed in mainstream triple-A games. These otherwise uncommon experiences in videogames can be those of trauma, disability, and depression among many others in order to foster healing, care, or perhaps challenge players and their beliefs. In this context, Twine offers marginalized creators a platform that can be effective in portraying these narratives and experiences due both to it being free-to-use as well as its text-based structure. However, as we have seen, Twine can also be interrogated from an accessibility standpoint, as its use is still based upon a certain technical literacy and in this way it is restrictive. When we consider gaming, game making, and accessibility, it is important to remember the need for access not only in games but on creation platforms, and consider the ways in which we can play on and with these platforms to make them more accessible.