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“Myths are good to think with” (Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss), and so is Twine.

Overview of the course: In ENG 110 “Myth, Legend, and Folklore for Storytellers and Gamers,” the primary focus is the Russian magic tale. The course has a heavy theoretical component.  Over the years students have expressed an interest in the ways traditional storytelling intersects with digital storytelling. So, I incorporated games into the existing syllabus, among them, “With Those We Love Alive” (Twine, 2014) by Porpentine Charity Heartscape.  I also changed the structure of the course to include gaming labs. On Mondays and Fridays we study the structure, motifs, and historical roots of Russian magic tales in lecture format; on Wednesdays, students meet in design quads to play the week’s assigned game and to engage in hands-on digital storytelling on Twine. 

 

Theory and Practice: My students study the morphological analysis set forth by Propp in his seminal 1928 study, and then apply that knowledge of pattern and purpose to creating non-linear stories on the Twine platform. Students come away from their study of Propp with an understanding that the linear-sequential structure Propp identified by 31 functions or actions is actually the magic tale’s memory of its origins in incantation and magic ritual.  Twine helps them to apply what they learned about “moves” (or storytelling loops) identified in Morphology to lay down story paths in complex and engaging ways.

 

The final Twine project requires students to apply their knowledge of Proppian morphological analysis, LĂ©vi-Straussian paradigmatic structuralism, Jungian psychology and traditional narratives to an interactive fiction game inspired by Russian wondertales. Students work in groups of four. Each group follows the three pillars of video game design: lore, characters, and plot. The fourth person is the Happiness Engineer (Über- Critic). The eight design quads release their games to the campus community through the Lit Hatch, our digital humanities micro lab. 

 

Modes of Thinking and Making in Twine: Although each design quad produces a 20-minute game, the emphasis is on modes of thinking and making in Twine.  Students spend weeks studying Propp’s syntagmatic structuralism (linear-sequential structure of the magic tale and its extremely limited number of functions, or actions) and LĂ©vi-Strauss’s paradigmatic structuralism (with its binary oppositions and synchronic mechanisms for creating meaning in a non-syntagmatic way). At this point they are ready to take what they learned in Propp’s Morphology and LĂ©vi-Strauss’s Structural Study of Myth, and later Jung’s Man and His Symbols and create their own stories in Twine.  Students who were lead designers for LORE described using LĂ©vi-Strauss’s concepts of binary oppositions to create basic movement in the Twine story. Students who were lead designers for CHARACTERS, for example, drew heavily on their reading of Jung for the order of appearance of certain characters representing 1) shadow archetype, 2) anima/animus, and 3) Self archetypes – the order suggested by Jung’s concept of the linear and sequential process of individuation. The final Twine projects immerse students in traditional story morphology, characters, and meaning-making, but also free the students to improvise and subvert the apparent linearity of Russian magic tales (Propp’s morphology allowed for “moves”– story paths that repeat a series of actions to intensify and, of course, delight and entertain) 

 

Library Component: Our Digital Initiatives Librarian designed Twine tutorials for the students that incorporate examples of canonical magic tales that have been adapted and parsed as interactive fiction.  This process introduces students to simple narrative presentation techniques and familiarizes Twine’s features by reworking a story structure the students are already used to deconstructing.  Additional tools and customization options are explained procedurally with a mind towards students with limited coding experience, but with some discussion of the connection between the building blocks of agency in interactive fiction and those of web markup languages HTML/CSS.  A summary infographic to answer common questions accompanies the tutorial and additional consultations are made between student groups and the Digital Initiatives Librarian to address structural and technical challenges.

 

Experiential Learning: Outcomes of Applying Folklore Theory to Making Twine Games:

The Twine projects are the culmination of a 15-week theory-to-practice pedagogy. Twine has turned my classroom of passive notetakers and solitary readers into active learners and imaginative storytellers.  We have collected the students’ own reflections on their learning experiences with Twine in the folklore classroom in the form of a final 6-page reflection paper, where they are specifically asked to reflect on the ways theory informed their story-crafting in Twine, and, conversely, how the specific features and utilities in Twine helped them think critically about theory.

 

Authors:

Stephanie Merkel is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. She teaches courses in folklore, eighteenth-century literature, theory of the novel, and translation theory. She is a Russian translator. She earned a PhD and MA in Slavic Studies from Cornell University, and a BA in Political Science from University of Notre Dame.

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