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The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

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Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#41

Post by Mountain_Skies »

bena wrote: post #21

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 u…

Maybe it could be called something like 'hands-on reading', which fits in well with hands-on learning.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#42

Post by 082349872349872 »

oliverbennett wrote: post #16

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.

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#43

Post by aidenn0 »

dylan604 wrote: post #39
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #13

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 a…

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 attemp…

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?"

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#45

Post by aidenn0 »

michaericalribo wrote: post #19
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #13

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 a…

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 cr…

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#46

Post by aidenn0 »

RhysU wrote: post #20
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the Lone Wolf series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)

Yes, yes I do have the Sommerswerd.

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#47

Post by tunesmith »

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#48

Post by redwall_hp »

Apocryphon wrote: post #31
yucky wrote: post #3

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.

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 electron…

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#50

Post by kej »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

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…

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.
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