Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Featured works on twinery.org
I've been thinking about a change to the twinery.org home page and wanted to get everyone's thoughts on the best way to do it.
The challenge is that Twine's audience is (should be?) very diverse in age. I've heard of many people using Twine to encourage kids to write, and I really want to help out those who do. But... right now, if you visit twinery.org, the odds are relatively good that one of the sample works listed will have some grown-up elements to it, whether it's language or theme.
So what I want to do is change the homepage so that school filters don't start blocking twinery.org, but at the same time avoid presenting a whitewashed picture of what the Twine community is about.
One technical problem is that IFDB -- which is what I'm using to populate the story list-- doesn't, so far as I can find, have a way to flag a game as adult, for whatever meaning of adult you want to use here. I think using something other than IFDB should be a last resort, because I think it's really useful to catalog Twine games in one place, and as a side effect, encourage the Twine and parser IF communities to mingle a little bit.
Right now the best solution I can think of is to manually flag works coming in from IFDB, and add a checkbox to the list to enable showing works with swearwords and scary themes. Even so, my heart trembles at the phrase 'manually flag.' So... there doesn't seem to be an obvious right solution to me yet.
The challenge is that Twine's audience is (should be?) very diverse in age. I've heard of many people using Twine to encourage kids to write, and I really want to help out those who do. But... right now, if you visit twinery.org, the odds are relatively good that one of the sample works listed will have some grown-up elements to it, whether it's language or theme.
So what I want to do is change the homepage so that school filters don't start blocking twinery.org, but at the same time avoid presenting a whitewashed picture of what the Twine community is about.
One technical problem is that IFDB -- which is what I'm using to populate the story list-- doesn't, so far as I can find, have a way to flag a game as adult, for whatever meaning of adult you want to use here. I think using something other than IFDB should be a last resort, because I think it's really useful to catalog Twine games in one place, and as a side effect, encourage the Twine and parser IF communities to mingle a little bit.
Right now the best solution I can think of is to manually flag works coming in from IFDB, and add a checkbox to the list to enable showing works with swearwords and scary themes. Even so, my heart trembles at the phrase 'manually flag.' So... there doesn't seem to be an obvious right solution to me yet.
Comments
I don't have a problem with your suggestion, Klembot. At school, I know I've avoided sending certain people to Twinery.org before for this reason. But, if it stayed the same, I wouldn't care either. It's up to you.
What does the marquee currently display? Games with a Twine tag or Twine development system (or both or neither)?
Perhaps have a set of guidelines that will specify what will appear on the front page. So games need to have a tag of 'Twine', 'Adult' or 'Non-Adult' (not sure on what that should be tbh, but basically something to counter adult?) otherwise you won't pull them from the pool. I know this would mean missing anything that didn't have that tag, but it would at least give incentive for people to properly tag their games? This could be communicated on the main page, and I guess if anyone can add a tag, they could always tag any games they think are worthwhile anyway?
I have no problem with adult games appearing on the homepage, but given the user-friendliness of Twine as a programming tool, it'd be a shame if it became off limits as a school resource or even for younger kids interested in trying their hand at IF so I do think Klembot would be right to try and at least offer a 'school' friendly version of the site.
And then have the checkbox like you said, to remove the filter.
Whitelisting known good works is safer than hoping people set adult tags properly.
[quote]A rough diagram of my ideas regarding the Twine frontpage is here: http://i.imgur.com/tVeGJRj.png
The main alteration is expanding the intro section to contain one or more screenshots of the IDE itself. I believe Twine's signature story map is much better at instantly communicating what the program is "about" than any mere paragraph, and I think showing a screenshot (or a rotisserie of screenshots) would be very desirable.
The other important alteration is the contraction of the works section. Haing thought about this, I feel like I have a problem with its prominence and content. Firstly, I think by having it as images and text, it unfairly biases attention towards IFDB entries which happen to have "cover art" uploaded to it, which is a pretty arbitrary distinction given the IFDB's present state, and doesn't really make sense for promoting a text-based IF tool. (Even making the default SVG images more "eye-catching" wouldn't really fix this issue, I feel.)
Secondly, I think by making it the largest section of the site, the site as a whole tends to unwisely overemphasise what *other people* have done with Twine, rather than what *you*, the reader, would want to do with Twine. It should in my opinion be the intro, not the works section, that has the lion's share of screen real estate.
Given these considerations, I propose somewhat reducing the works section to a text-only column rather than an image-based row. It can still possess its current features (the "reload button" etc).My opinion about the Works section cover art being too prominent still remains, but I'd like to hear what anyone else may think.
I think the featured works would really benefit from having their summary text included. Publication date is not so relevant, in my opinion, so it could be omitted or shrunk. I do think cover art is a good way to draw attention, so I would suggest including it, but next to and not instead of the summary text.
The Twitter feeds are not so useful for people who are new to Twine, I think, since Twitter messages often require quite a bit of context to understand them (since they are so short). And I don't know if people already using Twine will look at the front page very often, since most of the other information there doesn't change. It might be more useful to integrate the feeds into the forum, since people check that regularly for news.
I'm pretty new to Twine, so I still remember the first time I saw the front page. Several aspects of it confused me quite a bit:
- Both version 1.4 and the 2.0 preview are offered, but the word "preview" doesn't convey whether it is almost ready for prime time or quite a bit away from that (the latter seems to be the case), so I didn't immediately know which one to pick. If you want to have the 2.0 link there - I guess it might be useful to attract developers - it would be good to add the text "(recommended)" to the 1.4 item for example.
- There are download links for Windows and OS X, but no information about other operating systems. I understand that there is no installer for those, but linking to a page that describes how to get it running from source would be useful. At first I wasn't even sure if Twine would run on Linux at all; having a link would at least make it clear that it can run on other operating systems, even if it takes a few more steps than just running an installer.
- The "several different repositories" links made me wonder "which one should I pick?" But they're not even equivalent: one is for Twine 1.4, the other two are for 2.0 (the UI and the story format). I think it would be better to remove those links from the front page and add a wiki page to describe where Twine development is happening; on a wiki page you can use more words to give these links sufficient context.
Another thing that I didn't understand at first is what the relationship between Twine, Twee, TIddlyWiki and the story formats is. This is too technical to go into on the front page, but it might be useful to dedicate a wiki page to it. If people agree on this, I could write an initial version that a Twine veteran can then fact-check.The only downside, to me, of cover-art, is when the majority of featured works just have the generic placeholder. To me this implies a hurried work when they're compared to a game with a cover. Maybe a simple algorithm to make sure either to load either all or no more than half of the featured works with generic placeholder covers in one page load would be most visually pleasing and minimize the effect of "some of these people didn't care that much about their work." It's when the works without covers are the majority but not all that the works with covers put them to shame.
FYI, the default display criteria is now this:
http://ifdb.tads.org/search?type=game&searchfor=system:twine+-tag:sexual content+-genre:pornographic&pg=all
I didn't notice anything kid-unfriendly in this list, but let me know if you see something.
It had a tag for "sex." I added "sexual."