The Official Text Adventure Twitter Choose Your own Adventure Thread! #1 - In the Beginning...
Waffles about the Journey of Experimenting with Group Interactive Experiences over Social Media
First post time! \o/
What better way to start than to do the thing I set out to do! Seize the day! Use the anxious adrenaline and excitement to get this ball rolling! Overusing exclamation marks to make up the facial expressions you can’t see!
But first, a whirlwind tour of WHAT exactly the Text Adventure is!
My child.
It’s been a passion project I’ve been at the helm of for a few years now as creator/writer/DM, and at this moment, it’s made up of 3 official parts:
~ An improv, text based ‘Choose your own Adventure' style game played 1-on-1 between myself and a couple of individual players
~ An Audio Drama/Story retelling the events of the above
~ A D&D games based in the same world (currently one 1-on-1 session having run for over a year + a larger group session on hold!)
It’s a homebrew fantasy world, mainly meant as a form of escapism, immersion and levity for my friends & those who experience it- though, being the lover of tragedy that I am, there’s a fair balance of drama & other themes to make the highers feel that bit higher. I feel this has already been fairly successful, if two of my friends arguing over what happened in their crossover stages of adventure in public at Winter Wonderland a few years ago is anything to go by… We love the chaos.
(They’re good friends- unfortunately for one of them, their friend’s character mostly opts in for chaos and knows just how to press their buttons. Probably a whole post should be dedicated to figuring out how to keep that dynamic safe & fun for both of them!)
Anyhow, as part of the Text Adventures becoming a bit of a bigger & more public deal with casting calls and soft fundraising, it came time for us to do the terrifying- set up a twitter account for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come to love twitter, for all its faults; find the right creators to follow, and you get a wonderful feed of art, creativity and an AI curated raccoon gallery right there when you need it. Having an account for a thing you proactively want to grow, grow fast, and give people a Narrative Experience taster into the world for themselves, however, is a whole new obstacle.
So, with that in mind, the focus* of these posts will be to ‘verbally’ think through the process I’m working on, and out, to make a 280-character + 4 options at a time, once a day(ish) group voted narrative experience.
*Neurodivergence makes the focus part a little spicier. I am learning to improve my ability to write & edit concisely- while I do apologise for the odd ramble & tangent, I hope if nothing else it’s balanced out by the genuine love I have for this project. If I love, I waffle. Double-edged sword ‘:D
In the Beginning
To start somewhat briefly, the perks of using a Twitter poll thread for this story:
280 characters at a time, limit of 4 options to choose from = easy & quick to consume content, easy to catch up on the story at a later stage & keeps workload smaller (potentially…)
Familiarity with twitter & existing network there
Slightly ‘alternative’ use for an already popular medium with a daily-wordle-vibe reward to come back to each day- vote, see the effects of your group choices
And the cons:
No Schedule feature for poll tweets, organisation needed for fairly consistent posting
Reach, aka getting people involved
Group decisions could lead to some voters being disappointed & potentially confusing the personality & traits of the character they’re playing as
Only 280 characters between a choice being made and another choice needing to be made that’ll include descriptions, dialogue and setup for events.
Having a Group Voted interactive experience is a whole new world to deal with, but it’s an exciting venture! To help me figure out what would work best, I set out some really base level goals to see what could make it as good as I could with the time I have:
Basic goals-
Entertain! Immerse!
Get people interested in the Text Adventures
Increasing flow of interactions with the page - people showing up daily to see the next part of the story
As for the concern of the frustrations of having group votes & potentially not having your option selected; one of our Ko-Fi Rewards is ‘Your own custom Adventure!’, as well as others for naming NPCs, getting art for them etc., so should people be really invested and want that additional agency, they can do so as a reward for supporting the Project financially. (The money for which goes 100% back into paying our amazing cast & crew <3)
From here, we just wait and see!
Be sure to give us a subscribe if you’d like to follow along on this journey- there are a few more in this thread already in the making, including the ideas of Keeping the Character Consistent, and Beginning the Story!
It would really mean a lot, and plus I’ll link that raccoon gallery twitter in the next post… just saying! Because it’s technically impossible to find it outside of this blog…or something
And if you want to play along with the adventure, you can find the entire thread right here!