I teamed up with Angela Wang to re-imagine the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” You can play here.
Our first step was to deconstruct the story to its main elements, symbols, and themes. We wanted to maintain important aspects but play with other elements: character portrayal, setting, plot. After a lot of ideation that included ideas inspired by the Hansel & Gretel show at the Park Avenue Armory, physical installations, and 360 interaction in the web, we settled on using Twine.
We imagined parallel story lines and different endings–this was the most fun and time consuming part! It was fun to riff off of each other and modernize the creepy aspects of the story. By allowing the different themes and storylines to manifest, it highlighted the oddness of sharing this story with children for so many years.
Some of Gabe’s feedback was to delay the reveal of the story, and to incorporate more of the Twine elements. It was definitely challenging to incorporate all of the game-play aspects that Twine makes available. Aside from fixing things like some awkward language and typos, I think it would also be good to incorporate the 2nd set of questions in the story in a more cohesive way.
Since presenting in class, we’ve had other people play the game, and I think the response has been pretty positive. People find it funny and disturbing, which was our intention. There’s also a certain amount of surprise when people try to go back in the story and find a different path, only to find that they are led to an even more evil ending.