The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

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.

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.

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.

I got captured by UFO 54-40 in the 80s. I don't think I will ever know wether I escaped or not.

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 :)