The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books | Hacker News Reader

The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books

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158 pointsmirthlessend94 comments

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.

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 :)

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.

The book Life's Lottery by horror author Kim Newman plays with this (and is inspired by Choose Your Own adventure books)

Review (with spoilers, though not sure that concept applies here) by Interactive Fiction author Emily Short:

https://emshort.blog/2015/01/05/lifes-lottery-kim-newman/

I love Kim Newman for his Anno Dracula series, as well as his other genre-deconstructing work. "Coastal City" is a neat little jaunt through the progression in superhero comics, and The Night Mayor is quite a surreal VR love letter to film noir. Had no idea that he wrote a CYOA about a young man in '80s Britain! Sounds like Netflix owes him some inspiration credits for their own Bandersnatch streaming CYOA.

Funnily enough, the first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure on my TI-83 while I was supposed to be doing my math homework.

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 attempt at it, but saw the interactive bit flop so that majority of people just saw the "default" decisions made for them. Just never could find like-minded people to make this work to the level I was hoping.

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?"

Which is why I think that of Netflix's experiment here the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt "finale movie" was possibly the height of the art form. The obviously bad choices are always an excuse for more jokes and more punchlines and opportunities for surprise guest cameos from the show's previous seasons (and weird closure of multiple seasons of strange guest characters). The show's previous seasons already engendered enough of a feel of "anything can happen" that made most playthroughs, even "bad" ones, fun, and especially yielded a strong reason to see the entire play graph to catch all the endings and all the cameos and all the jokes.

It actually had answers for "Why would you want to do that?" and in ways that fans of the show's previous seasons would expect. From my experience, many of the other CYOA properties that Netflix attempted didn't have that multiple seasons of loyalty to wild "anything can happen" jokes and reasons to explore the interactivity in depth, but the UKS CYOA certainly had a lot of charm and fun.

(Aside: one of my favorite gags was the UKS CYOA's gag Netflix Skip Intro button.)

I didn't realize how many of these Netflix had done; the one my wife and I did (what verb do I use; watched? played? interacted with?) was the "Black Mirror" one.

Yeah, it was a big Netflix initiative and they tried a lot of different angles on it. I think the Black Mirror one was the most well known. One of the ones I found the worst was that they paid pre-bankruptcy Telltale Games to convert the first season of their quick-time event filled CYOA Minecraft "Tales" series from TTG's game engine to Netflix's interactive video engine. That was probably a bad idea in general, a combination of an apparently desperate TTG (that Netflix contract was their last project before bankruptcy) and presumably confused Netflix management. (The season was mostly fun in the TTG engine, quick-time complaints aside; the interactive movie form made no sense, especially having already played the TTG season.) I think there were five or six more beyond the ones already mentioned.

> 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.

This was also my first program, except I quickly discovered that I didn't have the patience to type in a whole book. Gave up after a few pages.

My subsequent programs were meandering self-written choose-your-own-adventure stories, though without plot or anything. It was a lot more fun than mindlessly typing in a text, but also not anything of interest to anyone but me.

> 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

Same.

I forget the name, but as a kid my brother had a choose your own adventure style book where you had to type in a BASIC program listing to get the page number for the next part to read. I was preschool age at the time but was able to get through it.

Yeah, how non-deterministic. I don't think I want to live in that world.

I was addicted to this series as a child. It is heartwarming to know that they were largely produced by single fathers. They definitely made a connection with me in my youth. I particularly remember the "Spacecraft 54-40" story, and how it had a thread that could not be reached by conventionally making choices.

For me, these stories were durable and engaging. I could read a book more than once because it had lasting value still to be found. I was rather spoiled with tons of books that I really never read, but Choose Your Own Adventure surely contributed to my early literacy. That series was one that would often find me reading late at night in the bathroom while my family slept.

I think the book you are referring to is "Inside UFO 54-40" - https://www.amazon.com/Inside-UFO-54-40-Edward-Packard/dp/05...

> It is heartwarming to know that they were largely produced by single fathers.

Leslie Jamison does an incredible job making Packard and Montgomery sound like flawed but fundamentally descent human beings. What a great piece of writing.

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.

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.

This is awesome! I had a similar thought with my own site I got started on at the beginning of Covid: Storylocks [https://storylocks.com]. It has nowhere near the level of intricacy that your site has it seems, but really cool to see other folks experiment in a similar way!

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.

I was coming here to post just this. Fantastic books and system. It's a shame it wasn't completed. The pages that ask you to continue in a book that doesn't exist gives me all kinds of FOMO.

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!

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.

If you're into this series, you'll likely love Project Aon.

https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

I was a big fan of Endless Quest for similar reasons. Loved CYOA, but loved the non-linear narrative along with tracking stats throughout your story.

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.

Archived: https://archive.ph/uSQnh

Thank you!

Thanks!

Ha! Two fiction-based posts on HN in two days? Love to see it :)

Shameless plug, but: I've been working on a site that was inspired by CYOA (although not exactly the same): Storylocks.com [https://www.storylocks.com/]. It's a simple way for multiple people to write stories together. Fiction writers unite!

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.

I've actually been "playing"/"reading" a lot of them from https://www.choiceofgames.com/. They also offer a scripting language called "ChoiceScript" that allow anyone to make their own games. I'm sure it's not super popular, but they have their niche audience.

Thanks! I've had the idea of writing a scientific theory in this format, and having a hard time with how I'd do it. maybe choicescript would be helpful in that regard!

That sounds really interesting! Good luck!

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

It goes the other way too - there were definitely a few CYOA-style books set in the Zork! universe. Although I will say the Zork ones did let you make arguably cruel decisions.

Sadly the adventure books often have much more detail and different outcomes than many supposed “non-linear” games.

They also has the ability to “quick save” and go back to a decision point and try again. Some would even let you loop.

I semi-recently read one of the original series (about UFOs) and a much newer one by a different author (still an official choose-your-own-adventure, "#39: Curse of the Pirate Mist"). The first was much better. Suggests another reason for the decline.

#39 was right in the heyday of CYOA books.

There are split opinions on the original CYOA authors. Pretty much everybody agrees that Edward Packard made very tight and well constructed stories. Many folks hate RA Montgomery's stories because they are weird and meandering, almost psychedelic. Personally that's why I always enjoyed them, even as a kid, but I think I'm in the minority.

At any rate I don't think many people feel the series started to decline until maybe #100+

Yeah, some of those books were revised in the 2000s. I think the settings were modernized a little, that kind of think.

Thanks for the correction!

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 electronic CYOA as well, since they were heavily narrative-driven and had simpler gameplay mechanics than traditional point-and-click adventure games.

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.

Apparently they're so popular that people who don't even know Japanese have been motivated enough to create tools for reading them which extract the text and put it into various machine translators and dictionary lookups; and more recently, someone even trained an ML model to do it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/rzhbdz/from_s...

I grew up right when Choose Your Own Adventure started so I have a first print, first edition of Cave of Time. Not that it's worth anything or that it's in good condition (it's been beaten and read hundreds of times, I even let my kids read it as they were growing up), but it's a nice period piece for sure.

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.

CYOA books were how I independently discovered the concept of the Depth-First Search, and (because I had a finite number of fingers i.e. bookmarks i.e. active memory) the inclination to guess which branch would end in death or an already-explored node sooner so I could prune the DAG. A lot of people learn these concepts with mazes or with FPS shooter games in story mode where they're navigating an unfamiliar 2D or 3D branching space, and the narrative version is a lot more abstract, but I think about it every time I'm teaching tree search or graph search.

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 usually light and fun as well, so that helps. When reading is not a chore, kids are more likely to do it.

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

I used to love Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf as a kid.

Hypertext (and consequently, epub, etc) is the perfect medium for this. Is there any official ebook version of the original FF books?

Lone Wolf was a great series. That series introduced me to fantasy more than anything else. I always thought it would make a great TTRPG.

Surprised there never was a crossover between Lone Wolf and Grey Star.

All the Lone Wolf books are free to download or play online here:

https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

Joe Dever has put all of the Lone Wolf and related books online to download for free or play interactively on the website:

https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home

That's 21 Lone Wolf books and 10 in the New Order books set in the same world, including one only published at the above site.

This is great, thanks! (and thanks Joe!)

Not exactly hypertext, but there's a company called Tin Man Games [1] that produces digital versions of Fighting Fantasy books.

I've played some of them on my phone and it worked really well.

[1] https://tinmangames.com.au/

Using gaze tracking with a CYOA-structured video or book permits another aspect of oral storytelling - noticing and adapting to listener interest. Attention focused on some character gets more scenes with them. Or the opposite?

For personalized science education, might one wander the richly interwoven tapestry of stories that is science, following one's interests? I've shown people IBM's stop-motion cartoon drawn with atoms, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0 , and they'd often ask about the ripples. IBM wrote supplementary content on them, perhaps because of such common interest. But when watching yt alone, its hard to engage, to follow up. Links in the description? Pop-up cards? With gaze tracking, one might notice the attention, and provide opportunity in that teachable moment. As if a mentor, tutor.

Gaze tracking without extra hardware is still rough. And patents. But slowly it's becoming something to explore.

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.

Visual novel? "Walking simulator" (originally derogatory, but sometimes used descriptively now)?

Visual Novel does sound right, good call.

Walking simulator I've heard applied to a bunch of different kinds of games, unfortunately. Mostly RPGs.

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

In the early-eighties there was a series of cyoa style books that involved the use of dice. Google just revealed the series as Fighting Fantasy and The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was the lead title. Highly recommended for 9 year old boys.

These books seem to have inspired the open-world gameplay model, best known in Grand Theft Auto where - even though there is a play-through sequence - gamers can also run off and play alternative sequences to some extent.

Toy Galaxy has a good video about the rise and fall of Choose Your Own Adventure - https://youtu.be/B-f5YelgmMs

Inform 7's ongoing text adventure efforts seem worth mention: https://www.ifwiki.org/Inform_7

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.

If you all feel like trying your hand at writing your own, Twine games is a pretty good

https://twinery.org/

It's harder than it looks

Jason Shiga's Meanwhile and Leviathan are the ultimate choose your own adventure graphic novels. The latter is also getting a steam release:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2128390/Leviathan_An_Inte...

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.

I made my own version of this my my dice company a while back on Facebook messenger (linked to our company site). It was great to see the inserts we did with the product getting used and people going on adventures linked to the different sets. I don't know that it actually drove any sales, but it was a labor of love that I still remember fondly.

I just want to thank Choose Your Own Adventure books for making my Grade School Book Reports a lot less work :)

Anecdotal, but I visited a second-hand SF bookstore in Stockholm a few months ago and I asked whether he had any CYOA books lying around. The store owner said that whenever he gets a new batch of books in, the CYOA books in that lot are all sold in less than a day.

I loved the CYOA series as a kid, and every trip to the library involved a stop at that shelf. More recently I enjoyed "To Be Or Not To Be", which is Hamlet redone in that style by Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics/Adventure Time/Squirrel Girl/etc.).

I am too young for the conventional CYOA books, but I still had the opportunity to enjoy modern digital CYOA games by publishers like Choice of Games (Choice of Robots is my favourite), and other indie CYOA games available on the android app store.

It's old but still working. Revealing the anatomy of cyoa books. https://samizdat.co/cyoa/ The flash animations don't work though.

Fighting Fantasy changed my life.

Yes! :D And Lone Wolf…

AIDungeon and similar games may usher in a new golden age for choose your own adventure

An indispensable resource: Demian's Gamebook Web Page, which meticulously tracks hundreds of gamebook series and the thousands of books:

https://gamebooks.org

Here’s a good online one: https://www.mit.edu/~erst/cyoa/

GPT-3 is surprisingly good at generating dungeon crawler style adventures. It even successfully tracks page numbers and the "turn to page X" prompts.

My 10yo will repeatedly replay interactive shows on Netflix (eg Minecraft Story Mode), but when I tried to introduce him to cyoa, it just didn’t click with him.

Oh well.

Sad they didn’t mention Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar when talking about multiple-paths literature.

I loved these books when I was a kid!

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.

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