Spent some of today writing another very short Twine game (see previously), this time playing around with one of my favorite poems, “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams. And so: William Can’t Sleep.
I like the poem in its own right, but I also like it as a meme—refitting it to varying situations is a long-running joke on Metafilter, where all sorts of things seem to turn up in iceboxes or to prompt the need for forgiveness or to be describable otherwise as being x, so y, and so z.
I have in fact previously written a silly random This Is Just To Say generator, if you want to just reload to your hearts content. And Metafilter friend Joe Saunders collected mefi variations for a while on a tumblr.
But, so, yes: I got to thinking about the idea of the poem as a note, from someone to someone: why not from William to his wife, Florence? And if he’s leaving a note, why? How did those circumstances arise? What about the world where Bill didn’t eat the plums?
And so William Can’t Sleep gives the player a chance to explore that small set of moments. You can dotingly recreate the poem as we know it, or, depending on your actions and reactions and inactions, produce one of several possible variants, or something more or less totally unrelated.