ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Twine, a free text-based game-making program, and autoethnography, an approach to research writing, can be paired together to build a playable experience that is a hybrid of rigorous research and immersive storytelling. I start with a discussion of how Twine and autoethnography are uniquely well-suited for building hybrid play experiences because they share both formal similarities rooted in deeply personal, underrepresented creative nonfiction writing as well as a history of resisting mainstream practices. To that end, I pull out various themes that Twine games and autoethnography share, including the telling of personal diverse stories, the engagement of the player through design, and the encouragement of learning through choice. Then, I move on to discuss how I worked to merge all of these themes in the construction of a hybrid interactive autoethnography about my experience of motherhood and gameplay. I end with a discussion of four hybrid states that emerged from the creation of my interactive autoethnography: (1) the hybridity of the researcher as a game designer/subject, (2) the hybridity of play/academic research, (3) the hybridity of highly personal writing as something to be played, and (4) the hybridity of play/ordinary or the mundane. I consider how these four hybridities influenced my writing practices and informed my game’s design. In all, I point to the possibility of hybridizing research with play to increase a text’s creativity, immersiveness, and audience engagement.
