[HN Gopher] The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
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The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books
Author : mirthlessend
Score : 110 points
Date : 2022-09-12 11:47 UTC (1 days ago)
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| yucky wrote:
| I used to love these books as a kid. I suspect they're not as
| popular now with all of the non-linear video game options that
| kids have. But in their time, these were a complete game changer
| in storytelling.
| abecedarius wrote:
| I semi-recently read one of the original series (about UFOs)
| and a much newer one by a different author (still an official
| choose-your-own-adventure, "#39: Curse of the Pirate Mist").
| The first was much better. Suggests another reason for the
| decline.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| #39 was right in the heyday of CYOA books.
|
| There are split opinions on the original CYOA authors. Pretty
| much everybody agrees that Edward Packard made very tight and
| well constructed stories. Many folks hate RA Montgomery's
| stories because they are weird and meandering, almost
| psychedelic. Personally that's why I always enjoyed them,
| even as a kid, but I think I'm in the minority.
|
| At any rate I don't think many people feel the series started
| to decline until maybe #100+
| abecedarius wrote:
| I don't know what the deal is with the #39, but it's
| copyright 2011 and by a different author than most of the
| originals. The #39 does seem to conflict with the copyright
| year.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sadly the adventure books often have much more detail and
| different outcomes than many supposed "non-linear" games.
|
| They also has the ability to "quick save" and go back to a
| decision point and try again. Some would even let you loop.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The visual novel genre is a huge non-Western electronic version
| of CYOA gamebooks. Wikipedia states "Visual novels originated
| in and are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up
| nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006." They
| descend from '80s early adventure games, and not paperback
| CYOA, though.
|
| Similarly, in the U.S., the popular 2010s licensed titles from
| Telltale Games were essentially electronic CYOA as well, since
| they were heavily narrative-driven and had simpler gameplay
| mechanics than traditional point-and-click adventure games.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Visual novels' popularity really can't be understated.
| They're adapted into anime the same way manga are.
| Steins;Gate is not only consistently one of the highest rated
| anime shows of all time, it's an adaptation of a visual
| novel. The Fate series (Fate/Zero, Unlimited Bladeworks,
| etc.) also stems from a visual novel.
| paulluuk wrote:
| I've actually been "playing"/"reading" a lot of them from
| https://www.choiceofgames.com/. They also offer a scripting
| language called "ChoiceScript" that allow anyone to make their
| own games. I'm sure it's not super popular, but they have their
| niche audience.
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| Thanks! I've had the idea of writing a scientific theory in
| this format, and having a hard time with how I'd do it. maybe
| choicescript would be helpful in that regard!
| baud147258 wrote:
| you can find them nowadays as video games, some with just text,
| some with higher production values. And I've also taken part in
| forum-based CYOAs, where one poster writes the adventure and
| the other posters vote on which option to choose, which can be
| quite fun and can be more reactive, as sometime the players
| will think of solutions the author didn't think of.
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure at least some were made into video games back
| in the day-I could've sworn I played the Escape series as a
| game on a Commodore 64 back in the 80s.
| baud147258 wrote:
| There's been some recent ports too: Steve Jackson's
| Sorcery, Fabled Lands, Deathtrap dungeons and others
| throwaway4575 wrote:
| Detroit Become Human is the modern choose your own adventure.
| kadoban wrote:
| That's probably about right. I know there's more games like
| that as well, I remember seeing a horror game like that on
| youtube that I forget the name of.
|
| Wikipedia just calls it an "adventure game". Feels like there
| must be a more specific name for the genre, but I don't know
| what it is.
| kej wrote:
| I loved the CYOA series as a kid, and every trip to the library
| involved a stop at that shelf. More recently I enjoyed "To Be Or
| Not To Be", which is Hamlet redone in that style by Ryan North
| (of Dinosaur Comics/Adventure Time/Squirrel Girl/etc.).
| mitchbob wrote:
| Archived: https://archive.ph/uSQnh
| scubbo wrote:
| Thank you!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| These books seem to have inspired the open-world gameplay model,
| best known in Grand Theft Auto where - even though there is a
| play-through sequence - gamers can also run off and play
| alternative sequences to some extent.
| facesonflags wrote:
| Inform 7's ongoing text adventure efforts seem worth mention:
| https://www.ifwiki.org/Inform_7
| slillibri wrote:
| Toy Galaxy has a good video about the rise and fall of Choose
| Your Own Adventure - https://youtu.be/B-f5YelgmMs
| Apocryphon wrote:
| An indispensable resource: Demian's Gamebook Web Page, which
| meticulously tracks hundreds of gamebook _series_ and the
| thousands of books:
|
| https://gamebooks.org
| aaron695 wrote:
| jonathankoren wrote:
| My 10yo will repeatedly replay interactive shows on Netflix (eg
| Minecraft Story Mode), but when I tried to introduce him to cyoa,
| it just didn't click with him.
|
| Oh well.
| tiahura wrote:
| In the early-eighties there was a series of cyoa style books that
| involved the use of dice. Google just revealed the series as
| Fighting Fantasy and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was the lead
| title. Highly recommended for 9 year old boys.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| Stories are all about stirring emotions.
|
| From two paths the story may take one will be less emotionally
| impactful than the other. Therefore, it will be suboptimal.
|
| It also spoils the element of surprise. If you know exactly what
| is going to happen, it becomes less interesting. It also takes
| away from the character.
|
| If you want user choice, create a video game.
| imranq wrote:
| AIDungeon and similar games may usher in a new golden age for
| choose your own adventure
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I loved these books, however the hacker in me quickly spotted
| that if you chose the page number which was highest (or lowest I
| forget which one it was, but it was constant) then it would
| always lead to the most optimal path.
|
| The books gave the illusion of being branching, open worlds, but
| were often actually linear. Good story to play through, and
| really evoked the setting.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I was always a fan of the Fighting Fantasy books - they were big
| in Canada and the UK, but less so in the USA. Interactive role-
| playing gaming in book form! And dice too!
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Fighting Fantasy books were a much bigger deal the cyoa books
| for me and my social circle around around that time. cyoa were
| fun but people I knew were obsessed by FF books. People would
| lend them to friends, borrow them, trade them, make or print
| extra sheets for recording stats and rolls. They built an
| ecosystem around themselves.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Or the Lone Wolf series:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)
| RhysU wrote:
| Yes, yes I do have the Sommerswerd.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The later books punished you rather harshly for having it.
| I think it was intentional so that people with more
| "powered up" characters (i.e. had been playing since book
| 1) were given a bigger challenge.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| I was a big fan of Endless Quest for similar reasons. Loved
| CYOA, but loved the non-linear narrative along with tracking
| stats throughout your story.
| posnet wrote:
| GPT-3 is surprisingly good at generating dungeon crawler style
| adventures. It even successfully tracks page numbers and the
| "turn to page X" prompts.
| bena wrote:
| I find they're also good for kids who struggle with narrative
| comprehension. You can read a normal book and not _really_
| understand what you 're reading. You can read every word from
| cover to cover and just process it as just words one after
| another.
|
| Choose Your Own Adventure books ask the reader to make choices
| based on the information they just read. So the reader has to
| make the attempt to comprehend. The books are usually light and
| fun as well, so that helps. When reading is not a chore, kids are
| more likely to do it.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Maybe it could be called something like 'hands-on reading',
| which fits in well with hands-on learning.
| tunesmith wrote:
| A few author friends and I have been using a "collaborative
| branching fiction" site I wrote 25 years ago. Took it out of
| mothballs when Covid hit, spruced it up in some ways. Now it has
| a react component that graphs the DAG of the stories (threads can
| merge together, loops are not allowed), lets you filter by un-
| concluded threads with some nice animation. I wrote some software
| that will project how big the story will be based off of average
| chapter length and choices per chapter. I'm also trying to make
| the site "guide" the authors in terms of how many choices to add,
| to keep the overall size of the story within certain guidelines.
| Since we're mostly third-person past-tense, we're trying to
| maintain a somewhat literary focus so that all threads have
| pleasing narratives that eventually end.
|
| Our most active story, Story of a Stone, currently has 318
| chapters, 1,064 pages, and a total word count of 265,964, or
| about the size of Ulysses by James Joyce. It has 4 unwritten
| choices, and a sprawl of 1.35 choices per non-concluding chapter.
| kej wrote:
| Is this publicly available at all? I totally understand if it's
| just something fun for you and your writer pals, but it sounds
| amazing and I'd love to see it if possible.
| tunesmith wrote:
| We're semi-open to new writers but it's one of those things
| where we'd have to get to know you. :) We're just a handful
| of folks in their 40s and 50s that use it as a low-key
| writing group, some of us attend a weekly discord video chat
| to read aloud our chapters, make comments, and joke around.
| New authors would need to submit a chapter to one of the junk
| stories so we can get a sense of writing style and then
| figure out which of the invite-only stories they could
| collaborate in. Submissions are technically owned by the site
| but authorship credit is retained. If anyone's interested
| feel free to contact me through my profile.
| racheltanks wrote:
| I loved these books when I was a kid!
| monknomo wrote:
| If you all feel like trying your hand at writing your own, Twine
| games is a pretty good
|
| https://twinery.org/
|
| It's harder than it looks
| oliverbennett wrote:
| I was never a fan of this genre as a kid, but recently attended a
| launch event for a choose your own adventure book about change
| management, of all things - https://www.change-ninja.com/
|
| Maybe part of the charm came from the novelty of the approach to
| the material, but I really got into it and 'cheating' felt more
| like learning. It got me wondering if the genre has legs outside
| of pure entertainment/fiction.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I first learned basic algebra from a cyoa-style book. It would
| introduce a concept, then give a sample problem, and depending
| upon what you thought the answer was, either advance, direct to
| content clarifying common misconceptions, or just restart.
|
| Somewhat like _The Little Schemer_ , but in larger chunks.
| hettygreen wrote:
| I just want to thank Choose Your Own Adventure books for making
| my Grade School Book Reports a lot less work :)
| otikik wrote:
| I got captured by UFO 54-40 in the 80s. I don't think I will ever
| know wether I escaped or not.
| simonh wrote:
| I never got into the fighting fantasy style of branching story
| game books, but then I discovered the Fabled Lands series by Dave
| Morris and Jamie Thomson. They're essentially open world game
| books, you can roam freely from location to location over most of
| the geography, with local branching adventures. Each book covers
| one region or kingdom. They also use a system of code words that
| set flags that enable quests that involve multiple locations, and
| changes to the world and events, so if you visit a location
| eventually you might trigger a change that means you go to a
| different version of that location that reflects your changes.
| It's a very different experience, to me anyway.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I was coming here to post just this. Fantastic books and
| system. It's a shame it wasn't completed. The pages that ask
| you to continue in a book that doesn't exist gives me all kinds
| of FOMO.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| I was addicted to this series as a child. It is heartwarming to
| know that they were largely produced by single fathers. They
| definitely made a connection with me in my youth. I particularly
| remember the "Spacecraft 54-40" story, and how it had a thread
| that could not be reached by conventionally making choices.
|
| For me, these stories were durable and engaging. I could read a
| book more than once because it had lasting value still to be
| found. I was rather spoiled with tons of books that I really
| never read, but Choose Your Own Adventure surely contributed to
| my early literacy. That series was one that would often find me
| reading late at night in the bathroom while my family slept.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Loved the books as a kid and one of the first programs I wrote
| was a straight up port of one of the books into the computer.
| Lots of print and if then statements. I wasn't artistically
| inclined so none of the illustrations made it into the port.
| After a positive response from a few classmates I gave copies to,
| I thought about selling them but was crushed when my mother
| explained copyright to me.
|
| One thing I noticed after reading a couple of the books was the
| gap between those written with a set world and those where the
| world state altered depending on your choices such as hearing a
| noise and if you open a door, you find out it is a ghost but if
| you go outside and look through the window, you find out it is an
| alien. I was torn because on one hand, it felt like the author
| was just making stuff up (which of course they were, it was
| fiction) but the different branches being so different made for
| more interesting reading when exploring the different possible
| outcomes.
| importantbrian wrote:
| Funnily enough, the first program I ever wrote was a choose
| your own adventure on my TI-83 while I was supposed to be doing
| my math homework.
| lkbm wrote:
| > Loved the books as a kid and one of the first programs I
| wrote was a straight up port of one of the books into the
| computer. Lots of print and if then statements.
|
| This was also my first program, except I quickly discovered
| that I didn't have the patience to type in a whole book. Gave
| up after a few pages.
|
| My subsequent programs were meandering self-written choose-
| your-own-adventure stories, though without plot or anything. It
| was a lot more fun than mindlessly typing in a text, but also
| not anything of interest to anyone but me.
| scelerat wrote:
| > Loved the books as a kid and one of the first programs I
| wrote was a straight up port of one of the books into the
| computer
|
| Same.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I forget the name, but as a kid my brother had a choose your
| own adventure style book where you had to type in a BASIC
| program listing to get the page number for the next part to
| read. I was preschool age at the time but was able to get
| through it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I had so much hope that with DVDs, Choose Your Own Adventure
| style content would become a large-ish segment. Unfortunately,
| it just didn't do what I wanted. So when I became a DVD
| programmer in the late 90s, I was searching for a CYOA style
| project to work on to the point of trying to produce it myself.
| People kept complaining about the difficulty of writing the
| script.
|
| Years (decades) later, Netflix did their attempt at it, but saw
| the interactive bit flop so that majority of people just saw
| the "default" decisions made for them. Just never could find
| like-minded people to make this work to the level I was hoping.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The Netflix one was so much fun, but "watching" it with my
| wife was a bit eye-opening for why the interactive bits might
| not be as popular; I would push for making obviously bad
| choices just to see what happens, but her reaction was just
| "Why would you want to do that?"
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The book Life's Lottery by horror author Kim Newman plays with
| this (and is inspired by Choose Your Own adventure books)
|
| Review (with spoilers, though not sure that concept applies
| here) by Interactive Fiction author Emily Short:
|
| https://emshort.blog/2015/01/05/lifes-lottery-kim-newman/
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I love Kim Newman for his _Anno Dracula_ series, as well as
| his other genre-deconstructing work. "Coastal City" is a
| neat little jaunt through the progression in superhero
| comics, and _The Night Mayor_ is quite a surreal VR love
| letter to film noir. Had no idea that he wrote a CYOA about a
| young man in '80s Britain! Sounds like Netflix owes him some
| inspiration credits for their own _Bandersnatch_ streaming
| CYOA.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| Weird!! This is such a strange and fascinating approach to
| narrative. This is kind of a stretch but...
|
| This reminds me of tabletop RPGs, like D&D (more fixed world,
| DM-mediated / -adjudicated, there is a single Truth to be
| learned) vs Old School Renaissance games (randomized outcomes
| for many interactions, for any number of things in the world).
| It's a different attitude towards how the world unfolds: does
| the world create itself as you discover it (player driven
| narrative), or do you discover the world that objectively
| exists?
|
| Something something metaphysics :)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| As a DM, I felt my job was to provide the _illusion_ that the
| world was fixed, but "behind the scenes" the world was
| definitely not fixed, so that the players would get an
| interesting outcome regardless of their choices; with no
| "turning the pages back" option in D&D, the illusion can be
| maintained better than with CYOA.
| rvieira wrote:
| I used to love Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf as a kid.
|
| Hypertext (and consequently, epub, etc) is the perfect medium for
| this. Is there any official ebook version of the original FF
| books?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Lone Wolf was a great series. That series introduced me to
| fantasy more than anything else. I always thought it would make
| a great TTRPG.
|
| Surprised there never was a crossover between Lone Wolf and
| Grey Star.
| sprkwd wrote:
| Fighting Fantasy changed my life.
| Emigre_ wrote:
| Yes! :D And Lone Wolf...
| mncharity wrote:
| Using gaze tracking with a CYOA-structured video or book permits
| another aspect of oral storytelling - noticing and adapting to
| listener interest. Attention focused on some character gets more
| scenes with them. Or the opposite?
|
| For personalized science education, might one wander the richly
| interwoven tapestry of stories which is science, following one's
| interests? I've shown people IBM's stop-motion cartoon drawn with
| atoms, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 , and they'd
| often ask about the ripples. IBM wrote supplementary content on
| it, perhaps because of such common interest. But when watching yt
| alone, its hard to engage, to follow up. Links in the
| description? Pop-up cards? With gaze tracking, one might notice
| the attention, and provide opportunity in that teachable moment.
| As if a mentor, tutor.
|
| Gaze tracking without extra hardware is still rough. And patents.
| But slowly it's becoming something to explore.
| shostack wrote:
| Between GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion, I imagine we're not that far
| off from dynamically generated choose your own adventure stories,
| complete with stunning images.
|
| And from there not that far a leap to A Young Lady's Illustrated
| Primer from Diamond Age.
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