Porpentine Archives

You guys, Porpentine wrote a game in Google Forms

Porpentine, the matriarch of experimental Twine games, is at it again. Known as the creator of games such as With Those We Love Alive (2014), Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha (2013), and the XYZZY award-winning Howling Dogs (2012), her trademark is evocative prose and bold subject matter: she often discusses femininity and queerness, and has no qualms about exploring the explicit, the gory or the overwhelming. Her work is generally heavily text-based, though many of her games include strong visual and audio elements. But now she’s breaking the mold—or not, depending on how you look at it. Her latest project, All Your…

Feature

Twinescapes, or The Rise of Spatial Hypertext

At least 100 pages of four novels. At least 20 pages of maybe half a dozen others. Not one book finished, not even in rough draft. These are the vital statistics of my long war with fiction. For most of my life now it’s been my fondest wish to write and to publish a novel. Sometimes I’ve wanted to author a book of the Great-American-sort, other times my ambitions have been more humble, or more genre-bound. Sometimes my drafts have been muddy slogs through self doubt, other times they came as if poured from a vase by a woman in…

News

Save your dying sister by exploring this strange 3D world through words

I remember reading once that a good fiction writer will paint images in your mind. This is vital to the craft; not just stating “a tree” so readers imagine a tree, but describing it so that this is uniquely a tree of your creation, one that will be remembered with intense detail if, say, referenced later in the text. Porpentine has not only injected my mind with everlasting and often gruesomely detailed images (being penetrated by a cyberqueen will never leave me) with her Twine work over the years, but has caused visceral feelings to thrive around my body, contorting…