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EnTwine: Critical and Creative Teaching with Twine is the first full-length collection devoted to teaching with the popular, digital story-telling platform Twine. Until now, few scholarly accounts have focused on how disparate communities use, share, and learn about Twine. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how Twine helps to forge communities of practice committed to learning and sharing together, inside and outside of classrooms. The book’s case studies range across humanities, STEM, industry, and activist contexts. Authors from across the world share how they use Twine in teaching—whether creating Twines for students, holding workshops, or using Twine to build communities and preserve the voices of the people who use it. Readers will find practical examples in the Twine Objects featured at the end of each section as well as a wealth of open-access resources hosted in an online repository and connected to the book’s digital version. EnTwine invites readers, teachers, students, and makers of all kinds to learn, adapt, share, and teach with Twine.

An entertaining deep dive into the world, gameplay, and evolution of the hugely successful Assassin’s Creed video game franchise​

A hooded figure stands in a bell tower overlooking medieval Jerusalem, surveying his prey. Parkour-style, he leaps down into the square to kill his target before vanishing into the crowd . . .

Released in fall 2007, Assassin’s Creed transformed video gaming. Across more than a dozen franchise entries, players engage with the eternal conflict between the Order of Assassins and the nefarious Templar Order, carrying out missions in a series of painstakingly rendered historical settings, from the Holy Lands during the Third Crusade to Renaissance Italy, the Age of Piracy, the French Revolution, and Victorian London. Everything is Permitted is an analysis of the development, evolution, gameplay, and world-building of this sprawling and distinctive franchise.

Cameron Kunzelman examines key themes and concepts that connect the games in the series. Combining close readings of the games themselves with discussion of the broader landscape of video game franchises since its initial release, he uncovers what it means for a game to be part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Kunzelman maps the elements that contribute to the immersiveness and continual playability of the games, showing how historically inflected conspiracies and science fictional premises ground the fantastical stories the games tell on a massive scale.

Diving into the real-world histories and ideas that the game designers used for inspiration, Kunzelman argues that the virtual conflicts between the franchise’s opposing sides offer intriguing insights into actual reality, from ethical dilemmas to the roles of freedom and fate. He demonstrates how, by incorporating themes of means and ends, control and freedom into its gameplay, the franchise engages with profound questions in a sustained, long-form way that is unique among video games. As the Assassins say, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

 

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