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Yah these were huge as a kid in the 1980s.
There were also these combination choose your own adventure/RPG books. It was an RPG where you rolled dice and fought monsters but the book acted as the DM so you could play by yourself.
Living out in a rural area having no one else to play D&D with those books were really cool. You had a limited # of plays on the book but more than one, and back then as a kid you didn't have the expectation of instant gratification & constant new stuff & content so it was fine.
Re CYOA/RPG combo, I believe you're referring to the Fighting Fantasy series: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy
There's a fun confusing fact about that series, which is that Steve Jackson was one of the creators and frequent authors. "Oh, Steve Jackson, the creator of GURPS and Munchkin!" you're saying. Nope, different Steve Jackson. But wait! That Steve Jackson did come along later and author a few books in the series. So now a bunch of those books have "Steve Jackson" listed as the author, and there's no way of knowing which one it is without googling.
There is also Fabled Lands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands) which was pretty cool because you could make choices that could take you to another entire book if you owned it.
There were quite a few RPGs-in-book-form. I had a Middle-Earth one that involved delving solo into the Mines of Moria. But Fighting Fantasy seems to be the best-known, and may have been the first.
Some of the Fighting Fantasy [0] series has been digitized on Steam, if you want a dose of nostalgia or for anyone who missed them the first time.
There was also a similar series based on the Chronicles of Narnia that is available on the Internet Archive [1].
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/856880/Fighting_Fantasy_C...
[1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=narnia%20solo%20games
Yeah they were great! I had a reasonable collection of these, and I remember on subsequent playthroughs trying to "forget" what was the correct way forward and trying to play it as if it was the first time. Or trying all the possible combinations until I had read every page in the book!
Warlock of Fire Mountain had an interesting twist re: memorization in that there was an actual maze embedded in it.
I remember putting together a 'logic map' for a scripting language in order to generate CYOAs, but never went anywhere with it. I wanted to have things like dependent choices on starting items affecting page turns and so forth. With only 400 items as a 'limit' to gamebook memory it was an interesting challenge!
Man, other people played these books with way more discipline than I did.
I don’t think I ever made it all the way through a book playing “properly”. Oh, I died? Okay, let’s just assume I didn’t...
I just went and looked at the Fighting Fantasy books and I don't think I actually had any of those.
There must have been another series that was copying them. Try as I might I can't find them.
I'm fairly certain the ones I had were the "Grail Quest" books by J.H. Brennan.
Maybe Fabled Lands? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands
I remember those CYOA/RPG books well. Anyone know some of the titles or how to find them in print these days?
That sounds awesome. I could have spent a vacation as a kid doing this sort of stuff.
This mapping format was used in the (relatively recent) video game Detroit: Become Human [1]. I found it to be a refreshingly fantastic take on Telltale-style branching story paths; they're instantly upfront with how the choices you made played into the outcome of each chapter. Unlike most branch-driven walking simulators, they want you to try it again a couple times, and reach 100% to see everything, and they give you the tools to help make that easier.
[1] (not too many spoilers; this is the map for the very first chapter) http://www.powerpyx.com/wp-content/uploads/detroit-hostage-1...
This kind of mapping format is also used in the visual novel/mystery adventure series Zero Escape. That series uses it in a somewhat meta way though, in that at some crucial points during the point, you are required to go back and play other routes in the map in order to continue in the current route, in a sort of Escape Room "piece together the different clues" kind of way, only the clues are scattered across different paths in the story.
Is it because when something happens they tell you “this happened because you did X”?
I realized that being explicitly about game mechanics actually add to the pleasure of branching games. For example the “X will remember this” in telltale games.
I’ve noodled with a CYOA table top game premised around a nuclear standoff. Set up a red rotary telephone to ring, play a prerecorded dialogue and offer options from which you - the president - must select the best course of action. Stress induced by the complexity of decisions to be made and the lack of control over how soon the phone rings next/who will be calling. A different tempo than Space Force, but similar feeling. I don’t have the technical know-how to build the phone, but writing it would be a hoot.
A few alternatives to building a phone have been put forth in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone suggest building a website with animation and sound. Then your players phones become the phone.
Having a physical phone is certainly cooler, but a website is much easier to build and distribute en masse.
So write it. Make a deck of cards to use instead of the phone. Or a CYOA booklet. The phone part is fun but it doesn’t sound super necessary. Get the game part right is the important thing.
But also you could mock this up pretty easily, just rip the guts out of an old phone and replace it with a raspberry pi. Use a keypad phone instead of rotary, it’ll make your life way easier.
Easy way would be to build an RNG system into the gamebook, such as "you must enter a 3 digit pass code" and have whatever number is the first digit 'seed' the RNG options. then later you can ask the reader to validate whichever of the 3 digits, and if they get it 'wrong' it acts as a seed update for new choices.
You could add expansions, like a Dr. Strangelove adviser that gives wildly bad advice and hidden Soviet spies.
I'd like to see the same map drawn out for Black Mirror's Bandersnatch. My impression when watching was it was far more superficial than the books I remember growing up with, but maybe there isn't much difference from the simple examples of this article structurally.
I wonder if the CYOA style movies will take off.
https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/black-mirr... (EDIT: Disclaimer... spoilers, obviously)
In my opinion it did feel superficial because a lot of the decision paths collapsed or dead-ended immediately.
I made the only complete map to my knowledge:
https://blog.thecybershadow.net/2019/08/02/datamining-bander...
That's because you were a child and simple things looked more complex.
CYOA movies are called video games. Bandersnatch was structurally interesting because it was done on a video platform, like VCR/DVD/YouTube Games of the past, instead of a game platform.
After I watched Bandersnatch I made a map. Unfortunately it seems to have been thrown out in a bout of housekeeping.
But IIRC you are right. There are a lot of initial branches but a lot are dead ends and the rest reconverge into two or three main lines.
I loved the Fighting Fantasy style books, and used to love making my own D&D style maps of them on grid paper. I do sometimes wonder if these books and players' habit of keeping a thumb in the previous page were part of the impetus for regular autosaves and quicksaves etc, or if that was just an inevitable development in CRPG gaming.
My mother, back in the UK, recently asked me "I found these books in a box, they're called 'fighting fantasy', do you want me to keep them or donate them?"
I've never replied so quickly with KEEP THEM!!! I think I had about the first 30 or so, give or take a couple of missing ones. I know "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" is in fairly poor condition, having been thumbed through and read a great many times.
I think I still have left over frustration at never having beaten Starship Traveler.
I think both my best and worst memories were Crimson Tide, which I remember having a genuinely moving story, but also a basically impossible combat encounter near the start of the book that meant you _had_ to cheat to get through it. I think it later turned out to be a misprint. Also the magic system in Sorcery (of just trusting you to memorise things) was neat.
I then grew into the Advanced Fighting Fantasy system which remains an incredibly friendly and easy to pick up set of RPG rules. My only sadness is that I lost my original books and the final book in the series (Allansia, for wilderness adventures etc), is always about £70 on Amazon.
I am trying to initiate my kids and their cousins into D&D now but I do miss having fewer moving parts to think about.
They have been breathed a new life by the release of interactive fiction adaptations for mobile, such as "Sorcery!".
When I was a child reading some of the earliest books of this genre I found that you just needed to choose the lowest page number to get the best option and advance the story. Seemed to work in every book too.
I was so inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I decided to try to write one of my own. I got up to a little over 100 pages (mostly typewritten on an electric typewriter, but later pages done in Apple Writer IIe), before giving up.
One reason for giving up was that almost each page I wrote created an obligation to write at least two more pages, one for each choice. It was a harsh but effective lesson in the power of exponents :)
I still have those typewritten pages in a canvas spiral binder somewhere. Someday I'll get around to scanning and OCR'ing them.
Some years ago we made a CYO-like game for iPad. I wrote a small tool that output the graph to a dot file, rendered it with graphviz, and gave to the artist to make pretty.
Here's the result: https://mobile.twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/1042537418983825...
Very very neat. When I was a kid I would pick these up from yard sales (the library didn't have any) and I would devour them. Usually after a few attempts at navigating the book though I'd just read it straight through and try and piece the story together in my head.
Seeing them laid out in a map like this is truly interesting.
My favorite game to play with these books as a kid was to find an ending in the book, and then try to figure out how to achieve that specific ending.
I loved these as a kid. It definitely advanced my reading a lot from an early age. The one that burned me time and again was Appointment with F.E.A.R. I kept dying and some of the clues required a calculation or solution of a riddle to know which section to advance to. Of course eventually I cheated.
I had almost all of the choose your own adventure books. They got boring because you would die unless you chose the most courageous path.
I find I interesting that the later stories are pure trees, no looping back paths. Seems much easier to write, but less of a “maze” feel to story.
One of these days I should try plotting a map like these for Ryan North's books, "To Be Or Not To Be" and "Romeo And/Or Juliet", two choosable-path adventures based on Shakespeare.
(I've already filled a spreadsheet with the data for "Romeo And/Or Juliet" while I read it, in order to see all the paths)
I just bought a Choose Your Own Adventure book a few days ago: it has exactly this graph on its back cover now.
I read these. They helped improve building search engines. Hidden relationships are what it's all about.
I was introduced to Twine recently here on HN; seems relevant:
The Kindle versions of the books I'm interested in are unavailable. Anybody know another place to purchase them? I have the money to not pirate these days but damn these hoops you have to jump through...
If you think this is fun, wait until you start mapping your own code.
A friend in grad. school reviewed academic journals on CYOA in terms of how this novel structure tricks the child reader's sense of agency though choice architecture. Here's a relevant excerpt:
"R.A. Montgomery’s CYOA book House of Danger can be used as a model for our analysis. Categorized at a 5th grade reading level by Chooseco, the book is placed into Sutton-Smith’s age of hero adventures but not all of the 20 different endings will result in a “happily ever after” (in fact, 10 are positive, 7 negative, and 3 inconclusive). As all CYOA books begin, it warns that “You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story”. It goes on to say:
The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens to you next. Think carefully before you make a move. One mistake could be your last...or it might lead you out of the House of Danger.
A “Danger Trivia Quiz” at the end of the book asks, “How many adventures did you take through the House of Danger? If you can’t solve this trivia quiz, perhaps you should take a few more” inferring that the reader has the agency to choose multiple versions of the story rather than settling for the original path.
In House of Danger “you” are an amateur detective who receives a peculiar phone call asking for help that leads you to a mysterious house next to a ruin of a prison destroyed by fire over 100 years before. Whether the caller is a ghost or a professor depends upon the path you choose. Multiple paths involve real or imagined attack chimpanzees, counterfeiters, and alien worlds. The reader is in charge.
Wolfgang Iser, in his book The Act of Reading, argues that the reader is integral in the creation of the world that the author lays out:
This ‘transfer’ of text to reader is often regarded as being brought about solely by the text. Any successful transfer however -- though initiated by the text -- depends on the extent to which this text can activate the individual reader’s faculties of perceiving and processing. Although the text may well incorporate the social norms and values of its possible readers, its function is not merely to present such data, but, in fact, to use them in order to secure its uptake. In other words it offers guidance as to what is to be produced, and therefore cannot itself be the product.
While Iser was not specifically speaking of the reader’s experience with a CYOA book, it seems clear that the ‘product’ of the world created in a CYOA book requires the reader’s participation even more so as there is not a single product for the reader to ‘take up’. She must choose the product in cooperation with the author. In the case of House of Danger, the reader may choose a path to an ending that involved just 3 choices and a total of 10 pages read (which ends inconclusively with the mystery unsolved thus likely enticing the reader to retrace her steps and begin again) or a path of 7 choices and 16 total pages read (that path ends in success with the counterfeiters caught. With half the endings being negative or inconclusive, it is likely that the reader will accept the invitation to keep trying other paths to get to the “happily ever after” that Sutton-Smith says this age group is seeking.
Kelly Angileri, in her article “Choose-Your-Own-Readers-Response-Adventure: Decoding Children’s Literature and Coloring Books”, analyzed CYOA books in light of three different reader response theorists, including Iser. “This type of book fits in perfectly with Iser’s idea in which the reader formulates the unformulated. It is like a do-it-yourself story-kit or ‘salad bar story’”. That is, a diner builds his salad by combining the ingredients offered, just as the reader builds the world of a CYOA book through the ingredients offered by the author. Montgomery, in House of Danger, offers a menu of worlds: dilapidated prison, modern house, laboratory, alien space ship, alien planet, dark basement, zoo, and quiet street. He also offers different “rulers” for those worlds including: professors, criminals, police, ghosts, aliens, detectives, wardens, guards, and intelligent chimpanzees. It is up to the reader to create the “world” salad from the ingredients Montgomery offers.
Although R. A. Montgomery passed away in 2014, his wife, Shannon Gilligan, has continued their business as both an author and publisher of Chooseco, the Choose Your Own Adventure publishing company they started in 2006 after purchasing the rights to the series which was published earlier by Bantam Books.
“Agency is central to it,” Gilligan says of the reader’s involvement in their CYOA books, “‘You’ are the person making the choices.” She notes that Montgomery did not want there to be a premium placed on some choices over others. “Ray did not want choices that were the ‘good’ choices to end up with good endings or ‘bad’ with bad endings. That is not the way the world works. He wanted to give kids the sense of the complexity of life.”
Gilligan says Montgomery began his stories by mapping out the pathways of all possible choices with page numbers, then he would write the story to fit that pattern. Each story had a unique set of patterns, although they had some parameters like fitting the whole book within 95-105 pages and not reaching an ending too soon (in shorter than three choices). “Ray would draw a map and he would stick to it,” Gilligan says. In recent years, they have added the story map to the back of their books to allow readers to visualize the possibilities. Their maps are modeled on the iconic 1970’s map of the New York City Subways...
However, Pfahl disagrees with Landow in this:
By limiting the number of choices the reader can make, the Choose Your Own Adventure authors would seem to better “empower” the reader, by Landow’s logic. However, it seems instead that the more that the author influences that choice, the more clear it is that the reader lacks agency. Furthermore, simply making a choice does not give a reader authorial control over a text… the simplified example of the Choose Your Own Adventure books shows that choices do not give the reader agency – since the author provides both the options and the results of them.
Although Pfahl sees the path options available through a CYOA book as a lack of reader agency, Espen J. Aarseth agrees with Landow and argues that the paths and options elevate the reader in a cybertext such as this {Aarseth defines cybertexts as “texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons(the string paths)”}to the level of a “player” in the narrative. Aarseth says:
The cybertext reader, on the other hand {as opposed to the reader of a linear narrative}, is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts the would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention ...a struggle not merely for interpretive insight but for Narrative control; “I want this text to tell my story; the Story that could not be without me.”
Since the reader is making the decisions AND taking the risks that arise from those choices (in House of Danger, some choices could lead to you being vaporized, eaten by aliens, killed by chimpanzees or stranded on an alien world), Aarseth allows that the role, while not at the level of the author, is greater than that of a reader just entering the author’s world. This active participation seems to call for an intermediary term between reader and author."
If anyone is interested in reading further, email me at StorysquadHQ[at]gmail.com and I'll share the rest. Happy holidays, hackers. :)
My current project: www.storysquad.education
The article is fairly useless without the pictures they are describing.
It appears you chose the wrong link.
To try again, return to Page 1. To achieve Internet points, reply snarking here.
The site tries to run a lot of Javascript, but you only need to allow the main domain for lazy loading of images. This also allows some user-hostile popups, but they can be blocked with uBlock Origin. If you first scroll down the whole page so all the images load you can then enable Reader View in Firefox, or presumably the equivalent in other browsers.
The article has the maps in it though. Do you have javascript turned off, or some other blocking in place?