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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

#51

Detroit Become Human is the modern choose your own adventure.

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#53
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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#54
post #50

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.

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#55
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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#59
post #6

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!

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.

Re: The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

There's been some recent ports too: Steve Jackson's Sorcery, Fabled Lands, Deathtrap dungeons and others
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