Choose your own adventure

sonya bateman said:

If you found that you couldn't stop writing because all the choices you kept including needed more pages, and you ended up at 400,000 words with no end in sight... Go to page 16

If you finished writing one, started to research publishers and found that the last one looking for Choose Your Own Adventure books closed shop in 1982... Go to page 212

If you've never tried writing one because those things are for geeks... Go to page 42

If you're thinking, just now, "I am a flashlight!"... Go to page Orange

If this post makes no sense whatsoever to you... Close the book and walk away.

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Weird this thread would come up. I just finished "playing" through The Warlock of Firetop Mountain My son (9 y.o.) and I were in a discount bookstore and I saw a little collection of four CYOA books being sold for around $7. I told him he had to give them a try. I had to take one for a spin myself, since I haven't since I was about his age. He loved them.

I thought they stopped publishing them.

When I was a kid I absolutely loved them.

I had D&D, LoneWolf, and CYOA. Had about fifty books total easy.

Usually I ended up saving the world. Of course, i'd die once or twice, but that's okay, can just flip back and make another choice.

I liked Lonewolf a little better because you customized your powers and abilities and then depending on the situation you rolled dice to help with the outcome which was really cool. So it was like CYOA on steriods.

Mel...

dgiharris said:

I thought they stopped publishing them.

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They are still around, in various forms. Amazon lists some recent reprintings of some of the original CYOA books (I've not seen them in book stores though). I've also seen a few new ones, like a set for the Dragonology range.

Add visuals to one of these, and you have a video game. Hence why the book version doesn't exist anymore.

On a positive note, I imagine writing one would teach important nonlinear storytelling skills if you were interested in writing for the game industry.

Quite right SP. I used to love the CYOA books as a kid, and when I got my first ZX Spectrum I programmed up a CYOA using 'IF' and 'THEN' statements on the Speccy and made my brother play it.

My earliest memories of reading on my own was me reading 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books. I love them. I've written one, a urban fantasy aimed at teens, and it was a lot of fun. With a CYOA, you get to write-out various plot lines and have a go with different endings. I ended up taking the plot lines and characters that I liked best and re-writing that into a linear novel.

Some of the CYOA books do some really cool things with narratives and plotting. Like there was one where at one point in the story you cross paths with yourself, or at least the 'you' you would have been if you had made different choices earlier in the book (a glimpse of what might have been). Or murder mysteries where it's only by going through the book several times that you can piece everything together. I even have a soft spot for the stupid random deaths. Sure it's not fair that merely by choosing to go left over right you end up eaten by Mars spiders, but sometimes life is like that. You might step out onto the street and get hit by a car. I kind of enjoy that out of nowhere randomness (and you can always just go back and try again).

I'm a little biased because I have another kind of CYOA story on the back burner, a murder mystery where all of the suspects are mad scientists. It's more than a little tricky trying to figure out the mechanics, but I love the genre and playing around with the opportunities it offers.

Am I the only one who hated these when I was a kid?

OK, I didn't play by the rules, when given a choice, I would read both.

Even as a kid, I thought they were gimmicky and lacked plot.

Once again, I'm obviously in the minority.

Sai said:

Sure it's not fair that merely by choosing to go left over right you end up eaten by Mars spiders, but sometimes life is like that.

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Your life is clearly more exciting than mine!

spike said:

Even as a kid, I thought they were gimmicky and lacked plot.

Once again, I'm obviously in the minority.

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It depends on the book for me. Some lacked plot and the story didn't work. Others used the interactive thing in a clever way.

dpaterso said:

Oh! Parallel lives! Hours of insanity, for free! Cassette tapes, argh! Adventure game writing on the old Speccy taught me programming which later led to jobs.

-Derek

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And when you've sat for five minutes listening to the screeching sound the Spectrum made when loading and just as you're about to start playing, the game crashed. Oh happy days!

I have fond memories of those CYOA's. The only title I can really remember though is Citadel Of Chaos.

spike said:

Am I the only one who hated these when I was a kid?

OK, I didn't play by the rules, when given a choice, I would read both.

Even as a kid, I thought they were gimmicky and lacked plot.

Once again, I'm obviously in the minority.

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I'm with you!!

Well, my only experiences with Choose Your Own Adventure books were A) In the fifth grade around Halloween, our teacher read one out to the class. Something about trick-or-treating and crossing the path of a witch or ending up at a house full of witches, and getting turned into a worm in the end. And she read it over and over and over that day because everyone wanted to do it again and make different choices. B) I discovered a weird CYOA book on my bookshelf about 2 years later, contemplated reading it, but really had no desire.

But when I was really little I used to get my older brother to tell me stories, and they would always be CYOA. He'd made them up off the top of his head, but there were always choices I would have to make. (He would also do "To be continued" a lot, which was so annoying). The only one I really remember was about three alligator friends who decided to go on a picnic, and had all sorts of trouble going through the woods (There was a fall tree in the way! what should they do? Go around it? Go over it?), and when they got to the campground all the picnic tables were missing. It was EERIE. And then when I got to the end they had just been taken to a picnic-table factory for repainting or something. I was highly disappointed in the lack of scary.

I tried once, as a kid! I might have been 12 or 13 at the time. I had no method for doing so, and of course it was all just a big mess. I wonder where that manuscript is now.
But I sure loved those books! I was a big nerd (still am) but had no friends to do roleplaying and such with, so I loved there was something I could do by myself.

The people who write them now, are called "Game Designers" - As SPMiller pointed out. They are actually in high demand, and well paid. It's usually a team, though there will be an 'ediitor' who monitors the storyline for internal logic and consistency.

I wrote a CYOA once and discovered... that I don't like writing them. IT was weird, I thought writing one was such a cool idea, but then when I was actually writing it I didn't want to write any branches, there was only one linear version of the story I really wanted to tell.

But, what I think would be great is a multi-author CYOA where each person wrote one path, then went through and fleshed out other people's paths, then an overseeing writer went back through and edited it to consistent style. A truly interactive novel would be a beautiful thing (and would make a great videogame).