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Tech

A Twitter Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Game That Tells Its Story in GIFs

Spoiler: you win by running away from confrontation and sitting down to pee.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

Clever Twitter user Leon Chang has created a choose-your-own-adventure game based entirely on hopping between different Twitter accounts.

You click through from account to account to play the game, each step accompanied by a GIF featuring Chang's pixel art. The hero of the adventure is a charmingly rotund bird, who might be familiar to players of 90s Nintendo classic Yoshi's Island.

Chang is not the first to use Twitter as a platform for a choose-your-own-adventure, but his humor and his well-crafted pixel art set this one aside. I called him on the phone to ask a little more about the development of his project.

Chang says he's been working on the game since September, but only in spurts. "The most frustrating thing was creating all the accounts," Chang told me. "Twitter has a really strict anti-spam feature that requires, basically, that you have a phone number for each account." His first attempt to get around that backfired, and his account was quickly suspended. He ended up using a "burner app" to generate phone numbers. The total number of accounts tied to this game? "Over a hundred."

Chang is still worried he might get suspended for his efforts, and plans to back up the game on Twine just to be sure it has a home.

Last, I asked him the most pertinent question: does he sit down to pee? "Yes, I do. It's more comfortable." Later, he clarified by email: "I don't do it in public restrooms, of course."