Twitter + Golf = Twirdie. That’s how I explained the game anytime I was put on the spot. And it worked. They would scrunch their brows and immediately ask, “And how does that work?”

Moments later, they would be typing in words that people were tweeting around the world in real time.

How did it happen? Twirdie was one of my first creations during my MFA at Parsons. While in one of Jamie Kosoy’s class about APIs we were tasked with making a game using live data.

My brain ignited at the concept of making gameplay that used such a mysterious and chaotic material.

I immediately gravitated towards the Twitter API since to me it was the most dense. The idea of making a simple 1 dimensional golf mechanic from the words people were tweeting around the world captured my attention.

I spent days and nights trying to get a small text search to make number decrease to zero (metaphorically the hole).

Eventually, it worked.

It was like magic, you typed in any word, and suddenly it would return how many times that word was used on Twitter in the last 60 seconds. Ramsey Nasser, my good friend and coding genius, was in the room when it suddenly started working and we immediately started to make a web version.

Twirdie eventually became part of my thesis on Live Data Games, exploring the ideas around how game mechanics could be built on live data.

Ramsey and I continued development of Twirdie on iOS and launched the summer of 2011. The following year Twirdie was invited to present at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop taking place at the Game Developers Conference.

It was a surreal event where we debuted the 2 player version of Twirdie by splitting the audience in half and pitting them against each other. It was a fantastic end to a ground breaking and imaginative game.

In the years that followed, Twirdie was unsustainable from a backend standpoint. Twitter eventually changed how their API gave access to requests, thus eliminating our ability to provide accurate real-time responses to the searches the game was based on.

Btw, true story: one night while building Twirdie, Ramsey and I would often put the recent version on an iPhone and test it out. Usually I would use “Obama” as a control test since it would return some what predictable results.

Only this time when I typed in “obama” the ball took off and went complete off screen. That meant the search terms were beyond what Twitter could return.

We tried again and again, same thing. Ramsey checked the code, searching for some obvious oversight.

When I checked Google to see if there was some other explanation I was flooded with headlines about the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Of course, “obama” was a word that, at this moment, was blanketing tweets around the world.

It was a humbling moment, realizing how the live data from Twitter wasn’t a one way relationship. Instead of players taking their results from Twitter to swing a golf club, we were realizing the impact of how real world events can break us out of the game and pull us back to current events.

It was a humbling experience.