For my second project of the semester, I knew I wanted to do something with the story of Shakuntala. I considered doing something like my last unessay but after meeting with professor helms I decided to take an alternative route. We had talked about me creating a possible text quest following the storyline of Shakuntala still as that was my original plan. I thought it would be interesting for a text quest and work well with the storyline as well.
From here though I had to brush up on exactly what a text quest is. I had never actually done a text quest my self before, or even really heard of what it was. A text quest is “Text Quest is a first-person text-based adventure for PC and Mac where every object in the world is made of words. Trees are the word “tree,” clouds are the word “cloud,” and giant spiders- well, you get the idea. Travel from dark forests to colossal caves as you solve puzzles and embark on a literal text quest.” Once reading around and playing some text quest on my own time I was able to become familiar with the format enough to start creating my very own text quest.
Now, I tried to think of what sort of text quest I would make. I wanted to consider some of the common themes throughout the story. Two themes that I thought particularly stuck out to me were the themes of love and nature. We see the theme of love throughout Shakuntala whether between her and king Dashyanta or between Vishwamitra and Menaka (even though we learn more about them later on). We see the theme of nature throughout the story as well whether talking about how Shakuntala was raised to by the end of the story when she’s off on her own (sort of). I wanted to be able to mention both of these themes in my text quest. After looking over the story and themes I decided to make my text quest so players would read and select options to work their way to the very end of the story. I’m definitely not familiar with this style of writing, “just going with the flow” I guess you could say, but I do like trying new writing forms and this one I thought ended up being really fun. Also, I definitely recommend using Twine to anyone interested in this stuff. it was recommended to me by two people for this project as well. It’s highly user-friendly because I had never done this type of writing before (as I said above) and was nervous to try but it ended up working out perfectly.
Why literature matters… I think it’s super intriguing and different how with this style of literature specifically you can really make it into any way you want. This isn’t the most thoughtful answer that I could probably come up with for this question because it’s such a broad question and could have any multiple answers, but I think mine works well enough. Say for example you assign a specific reading for our class. Each person in the class is going to read and probably interpret the story in their own way compared to the student sitting in the seat next to them. One student could say they thought the main idea in the book was love and how Shakuntala dealt with that and another student could say it about war secretly and have all the reasons to back up his case. No one thinks exactly alike. Literature this way gives us students the chance to keep creating and making ideas to inspire themselves and others with their work!
Sprockets and Springes 