This is why you should make a really simple game like me! What it lacks in skill, ambition, and polish, it will hopefully make up for in despair and shock value.

Good, good. It might cheer me up.

I wonder how many major sites will cover Fear of Twine.

It could happen.

I've sent a handwritten email to Adam at RPS. I don't really know anyone at IndieStatik or Adventure Gamers.

I'll try to send one to Jack from Adventure Gamers, but I sadly cannot guarantee that I will. Also hope to be able to cover the exhibition on indiegames.com and (obv) gnome's lair early next, provided nothing shit happens.

I have issues with YOU. Are THEY fixed?

If you don't know you'll never know.

Today I can finally say I played all 16 pieces and absolutely loved all of them that I understood.

The fact that I loved the ones I understood doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t love the ones I didn’t!

Duck Ted Bundy made me laugh some, but I can’t connect with it because I had to google who Ted Bundy is, and only after correctly deducing there had to be someone famous named that, for I was obviously missing something. 3rd world problems I guess.

Truth is Ghost was confusing but it managed to amaze me because you can really tell these characters have personalities and relationships that were developed long before Richard announced the exhibition. And the same can be said about its lore.

The Scientific Method felt like I didn’t get some deeper point the story was trying to make but it’s so well written, from the very first sentence to the very last, that I just know I like it.

Drosophilia was really weird, but it was made by Pippin so I’m sure it has many redeeming qualities.

Oh, grouping all this stuff must have been hard! I’d love to know what each room is supposed to do.

Believe it or not, Ripley, it was easy! The rooms weren't themed really--I originally wanted to do that but there wasn't any that seemed natural. So I went more for balanced. I definitely wanted the first room to give kind of an idea of the major flavor a of Twine, so that took the most care, but the choices felt almost obvious to me.

Debt was a fucking gift: I have not seen a Twine like that before and it was such a snazzy bang--I really wanted it to feel like throwing down a gauntlet. Duck Ted Bundy was just so funny and well written and yet much more "traditional" that it was a natural second choice. Conversation was probably the most "traditional" entry--it's what a lot of people tend to think of when they think of Twine, it's a personal story involving aspects of sexuality by a first-time author, and I definitely wanted to highlight the inclusiveness and accessibility of the form--plus, like you said in your write up, Joel, it's just a lovely piece. And then, I mean Jonas's Great Red Dragon (nmiaow) is just awesome. I think it's some of your best writing, man--either way it almost gives a kind of bedtime story feel to it. Kinda like you play these four games in one night, then you go to bed.

March, if you're interested in your particular positioning, THE FOLLOWUP TO "THE MATTER OF URQUEL THE GREAT BLACK DRAGON" is, like, a little bit of a big deal, and so I wanted to hold it back for a little bit because I didn't think the crowd was pumped enough. In addition, it's meta, it's not a game that completely works unless you've played a few Twines before, and by the time they get to yours they've seen eight Pippin Barr got the same treatment, and I like that it ends the room because there's nothing much you can say for a little while after it--you really gotta turn off the computer and curl up for a bit.

My own game was last because I like to have the last word and because people are gonna play my game anyway. It's my exhibition. Spoiler alert, my own game's gonna get more tweets than anyone else. In fact I'm gonna tweet a link to it right now. Hang on.

Anyway; the rest kind of slotted into place in a similar fashion. I didn't want to put two longer pieces next to each other, two horror pieces, etc, and a lot of the rest was just kismet, really. There were 16 entries--it's my favorite number because it divides so evenly. Four sets of four--beautiful!

It has something very Sapphire & Steel about it, in a way. I love stories of that flavour.

I know how that works. I'm pretty sure that a lot of what I do is an attempt to recreate the flavour/vibe/feel of art that I was fascinated by but couldn't fully understand as a child. Not nostalgia, but an attempt to recapture that sense of wonder and possibility and scope.

I mean, a huge part of the Lands of Dream games is what I imagined the full versions of shareware games to be like. I'm pretty sure those long-forgotten games hold up a lot less well than Sapphire & Steel, but at the time I just barely understood the language they were in, let alone how they actually worked. I knew I could never buy these games, but I longed for these amazing worlds to explore, and I was certain there was so much more to the full versions.

The same goes for literature, movies, TV. Rarely do I encounter something that lives up to what I imagined there was. It does happen, but not very often.

Looking at screenshots, I'm not sure I ever played Dare to Dream. I got some of these games off CDs with "5000 shareware games" and the like; some must be pretty obscure. I wish I remembered their names.