A Twitter CYOA? Choose Your Own Escape!

Oh, Twitter. Apparently you are not content being a medium that encourages us to waste our time tweeting jokes at podcasts in the hopes they'll mention us on the show, or to contribute our voices to the thunderstorms that are hashtag wars in full swing. Now you want to be a gaming platform too.

Or such is how I choose to interpret the appearance, earlier this week, of a Choose Your Own Adventure game built using multiple Twitter accounts, telling a simple story of pursuit and flight in fleeting snapshots.

It's not a bad way to spend a few minutes, truth be told. You can even impose your own design framework on it! E.g. you can go through it once until you hit an ending, and then you never play it again because that is your story. I call this the Telltale Walking Dead approach. Alternatively you can play through the game making liberal use of the back button until you see all the endings. I call this the Being Twelve And Using Your Fingers As Bookmarks Until You Run Out Of Fingers approach.

The game is courtesy of a chap called Terence Eden, who is an internet consultant. That sounds like a job I'd like. I assume it largely involves nodding sagely whilst reading listicles and periodically spitting tea over my keyboard at a particularly good cat macro.

Perhaps there's a little more to it than that, to be fair, as some thought has been put into this simple adventure game. For a start it's entirely on Twitter and doesn't use any external web pages, in contrast to the previous Twitter-based CYOAs Eden tips his hat to. You can read about how the adventure was written and put together over on the author's blog.