Choose Your Own Adventure

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I'm 56. I first discovered these in maybe 1980 or 81? These books were foundational to my sense of creativity, and expectations of entertainment. I had discovered D&D the year prior, and this was fuel to the fire. To this day, when I'm bored, I create my own adventure, and don't rely on computers, film, books, etc... these books taught me how to become self-sufficient and self-entertaining. Funny, the same year I also discovered Douglas Adams and I think Gary Numan's Cars was still on KC Kasem's top 20. 1979-1982: genesis of identity.

Also, this was the last good incarnation of the trope I'd seen in a while: https://www.cracked.com/blog/choose-your-own-adventure-on-dr...

In ninth grade in the town I grew up in, there were two junior high schools that traded off computers each semester. With a "newsletter" including printed programs.

The first text adventure I encountered was a future friend's multiple choice adventure, starting in a cave, called "The Cave".

With that as inspiration, began years of my own text adventures, from multiple-choice to broad grammars and vocabularies. "Command English" is what I called my grammar. The first starting at the entrance of a cave. Later versions, almost always involving caves. And mazes.

In high school I worked on a massive adventure called "The Wanderer", with all of my innovations. With an important cave that had to be rapelled down to from a cliff edge. Until the day I was working on it after school, and saved my latest version to disk before going home. At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.

My enthusiasm for creating adventures suffered a fatal blow.

I was so obsessed with this when I was a kid. I created a complete node graph a few years ago in order to cheat and to show the entire tree structure of the book:

https://archive.org/details/magic-master-node-map

I simply didn't have enough fingers to bookmark previous pages if I made a choice which led to a bad ending. This was my first taste of depth-first search algorithm.

With the graph visualization as an oracle, I was able to explore all threads leading to all the different possible endings. You can read this book in OpenLibrary:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL30096W/Choose_Your_Own_Adven...

I carried my childhood obsession with me all the way to Ghidra / IDA debugger which shows the disassembly blocks with arrows in its graph view.

I'm now a Reverse Engineer thanks to the Choose Your Own Adventure books I've obsessed over and read a lot as a kid. :D

I've begun a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story that's more a philosophical argument (or art?). There are a lot of paths through the story but they all converge to the same ending.

It's something I have believed and have especially reflected on when my mother died a couple years ago. I have wondered for some time whether she could have been happier had "x" happened instead of "y".

She had such a bad childhood that I contemplated what it would be like to clone her and raised her as my daughter. How different might her life be if she had a healthy, happy family.

But I keep coming to the conclusion that she was an inherently unhappy person and, that while plenty of life-events may have made things worse for her, in the end I think perhaps she was "fated" to be unhappy after all.

So the idea was a "Choose your own adventure" where you more or less end up in the same place regardless. Maybe a bit wealthier, maybe with 2 instead of 3 kids — but the fundamentals were already "cast".

(And anyway, upon further reflection I came to see how much my oldest daughter is more or less my mom. We raised her as best we can and yet shades of my mom's "genetics" are clearly there.)

I used to love these books as a kid. I got really proficient at using multiple fingers to manage all my "Save States" while I was going through the adventure.

As an adult I spent a lot of time thinking about how I seem to have the same rough success ratio at making life decisions as I did when I was a child reading choose-your-own-adventure books.

In 2022 the New Yorker wrote up the CYOA franchise, early history and later existence, in a story that is a choose your own adventure itself: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-a...

Today I learned: The creator of Chose Your Own Adventure is currently 94 and has a website at https://edwardpackard.com/

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Packard_(writer)

My summer camps were spent buried in the Lone Wolf book series. The smell of the books. Keeping all my fingers at all the choice points so I could cheat my way back to the book end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_(gamebooks)

The ending the sticks with me the most is Inside UFO 54-40. There's a specific ending you cannot reach by following the instructions. You have to "hack" the book and turn to the page directly.

Ooof. Memory unlocked: As an only child staying at my great-grandmother's country home, I played through a series of "gamebooks" that added character stats, inventory and random rolls to the CYOA theme.

https://www.scribd.com/document/717863174/The-Way-of-the-Tig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Tiger

I loved CYOA books as a child of the early 80s. It was a boom time for choice-based books. CYOA was first but books aimed at more mature (meaning much more gory) audiences were common. Fighting Fantasy was probably the best known, but Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger were also amazing to my young mind.

This kind of Interactive Fiction is still being developed today. If you like Star Trek you might enjoy my own choice-based game[0] but literally hundreds of games of various level of complexity are being produced every year.

[0] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/

My sister recently got an "escape room book", which seems to be an attempt to put the escape room experience into puzzle book format. I guess it's also a kind of spiritual successor to these types of books.

I loved these books so much I wrote part of my book's first chapter[1] in the same style. Here's an excerpt:

> In all the years I’ve spent studying and working with cryptography, I’ve never noticed a single pattern in which a cryptographic primitive ends up being used in real-world applications. Things are pretty chaotic. Before a theoretical primitive gets to be adopted, there’s a long list of people who get to handle the primitive and shape it into something consumable and sometimes safer for the public at large. How can I even explain that to you?

> Have you heard of Choose Your Own Adventure? It’s an old book series where you got to pick how you want to step through the story. The principle was simple: you read the first section of the book; at the end of the section, the book lets you decide on the path forward by giving you different options. Each option was associated with a different section number that you could skip directly to if you so chose. So, I did the same here! Start by reading the next paragraph and follow the direction it gives you.

> Where it all begins. Who are you? Are you Alice, a cryptographer? Are you David, working in the private industry and in need of a solution to your problems? Or are you Eve, working in a government branch and preoccupied by cryptography?

> You’re Alice, go to step 1.

> You’re David, go to step 2.

> You’re Eve, go to step 3.

> ...

(you can read that for free I believe)

[1]: https://livebook.manning.com/book/real-world-cryptography/ch...

Interesting and cool books, and they have been promoting them recently:

https://www.cyoa.com

As others have noted, another interesting series of interactive/game books is the Fighting Fantasy series, some of which have been converted into smartphone and console games/apps:

https://www.fightingfantasy.com

(There are at least two prominent Steve Jacksons in gaming. Somewhat amusingly, and confusingly, American Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, happens to republishing the Fighting Fantasy books by British Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, both of Games Workshop fame.)

I hadn't heard of Lone Wolf gamebooks (https://magnamund.com) or Way of the Tiger (which was also apparently converted into software) until now! Are there any other interactive/game book series of note?

Almost every branch of every story in Choose Your Own Adventure books ended with bold, centered text that said:

     THE END

But there was one story I vaguely recall where if you made the "wrong" choice, you fell into a bottomless pit (the books were always in the second person) and you kept falling and falling, forever, and the text said:

    THERE IS NO END

I still remember the chills I got reading this. I wonder how kids these days get their introduction to existential horror?

> They liked to be told a bedtime story, but Packard was usually so exhausted that he had trouble coming up with one. So, he slyly enlisted his daughters’ help with the creative process. He would feed them a little bit of a story in which they were the stars, then ask them what they wanted to do next. Their answers would jog his tired imagination, and he would be off and running once again.

This is interesting because, without knowing this was the birth of CYOA, I actually arrived at this solution with my daughter. Actually, even better: it was her idea. Bedtime stories are better if she's an active participant and the main character of the story, with me controlling all NPCs. It can be exhausting: re-telling a story can be done on autopilot (the only risk is falling asleep) but creating an adventure on the fly is both very rewarding and extremely energy draining.

Boy, will we have a lot of fun when she's a bit older and I introduce her to roleplaying games!

I've literally just started replaying/rereading these with my 9yo son. It's been eye opening.

A book that allows you to _do things_ is finally a challenge to the allure of the tablet and the Switch.

I adored these books when I was a kid, and a few of us friends re-invented them in college in the 1990's as email chains. You'd write a few introductory paragraphs and a choice, and then email it to a few friends. You'd then end up writing multiple paths as you went, depending upon what your friends chose. The first one I wrote started as just a scruffy little dog who escaped his backyard. He ended up going on all kinds of wild alternate adventures, and did, unfortunately, end up dying quite a few times.

I loved "The secret of the ninjas". It had a better research from Japanese culture than tons of local pulp novels (from Spain) about some US born Kung Fu fighting spy/secret agent soon-meeting-a-Japanese-sensei-with-cheap-tropes-everywhere.

That being a book for kids compared to cheap pulp novels were meant for lowly-educated adults, but I would expect less for preteen books where a perfect mythos depiction wasn't always a thing.

Still, Hollywood movies and some Asian exploitation series weren't much better...

If you like CYOA games, you may enjoy my upcoming game Outsider, a modern sci-fi take on dynamic narrative games. It will launch in 7 weeks and I'm working on it full-time!

Here is the Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

As this is a case of perfect timing, I'd like to enlist your help: My 8 year old son loves these right now, we speak dutch (Nederlands) at home. Do you have suggestions? Are the old Choose your own adventures available translated? Thanks

I already have a few from the library - one title for each series:

* Marcel Groenewege: Schaduwkraai

* Jack Heath - 300 minuten

* Tim Collins - Verraders in de ruimte

* Dustin Brady, Het geheim van spookeiland.

OK the line from his mom equating the bends with diarrhea really made me chuckle. Sounded like something my mom would have said.

I miss the old late 1980’s/early 1990’s choose your own adventure phone games. They had an early 1940’s radio show vibe to them with sound effects and voice actors. The felt like old laser disk arcade games too. No one seems to remember them and I can’t find them online.

Loved these as a kid, I think I had most but not all of them. The Choice of Games mentioned in TFA are often a lot bigger and more complex than those books, but worth looking into for fans. Delight Games is a lesser known company with a slightly different style of them.

Interactive Fiction still exists and is being actively developed. Check out the top games on Interactive Fiction DB. https://ifdb.org/viewcomp?id=1lv599reviaxvwo7

I absolutely adored these books as a kid! Spend every dime of bookfair money on them every year and used to beg my parents to take me to the library to check out others.

I love the framing of them in this article as the gateway drug to interactive entertainment.

I always thought there was decent promise in gwerns (gpt-3 era) proposal of a meta-llm CYOA: https://gwern.net/cyoa

Wonder if anyone ever took a crack at this

Just in case anyone's interested, https://twinery.org is a pretty great editor and associated tooling for making your own CYOA games.

This brought back fond memories of contorting my fingers as bookmarks so that I could keep track of my last N moves, giving me an “undo” stack of however many previous steps I could!

I used to pick up as many these as I could as a poor kid at swap meets.... I could read them over and over and still enjoy them. Some great memories.

I had these and would scour book stores when on vacation with my parents to find new ones. UFO 54-40 gave me nightmares as a young kid.

The mystery of the Highland Crest is one of my favorite books ever! It gave me another perspective on the medium when I was younger

here's the PDF of the cave, you can choose to download it or if you're a masochist and want carpeltunnelsyndrome you can use the flipping ui here. https://pubhtml5.com/obber/cznb/

Around 1991 I remember having a book that was a cross between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D. It was about the same physical size, but it was a full (albeit small) D&D campaign. There was a character sheet at the back of the book you could copy, and then as you went through the game you would roll for yourself and for your foes, tracking hits and HP on your sheet until you won all the loot or you died.

I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).

Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?

> I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea.

It would be so, so much worse if the bends were when dissolved diarrhea came out of solution and formed diarrhea bubbles in your blood.

Has anyone tried these books for their kids? Or are they just too dated?

I grew up dog-earing COYA and holding three pages with my fingers like an improvised undo stack. Later it was Suikoden II on a beat-up PlayStation, chasing branching story lines and watching a single choice ripple for hours. The throughline the quiet thrill of being inside the story and having it remember me when I came back.

For a bootstrapped AI project we stumbled into that same space, but from an unexpected angle. Our initial vision was grand, abstract: an interaction layer for stories. When we started building, we assumed gamers and tech folks would care. We were totally wrong, our early users, predominantly women 18 to 35 who grew up on Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural etc. They were using our characters to practice difficult conversations, testing an episode where you’re the love interest, the savior or co conspirator.

Ppl were genuinely writing novella-length interactions daily. 60+ min avg sessions. 100 day streaks. Turns out the human need for deeper story-engagement is stronger and stranger than we imagined...

As a kid, choose your own adventure made me so mad because the covers are super appealing, but by the time they emerged I was a huge sci-fi fan and had burnt through everything the big three had written and was super excited when I picked up my first CYOA book. I didnt know what it was. When I hit the first crossroads I was like, what the is this??!! I wanted a well crafted story. Not a gamification of the style of sci-fi I’d come to know and love. I went back a few times because I really wanted to like them. But there was no way. I still remember the book was Inside UFO 54-40.

I loved these books. We had a bunch in grade school, few different kinds, I think there was a batman one, though some described pretty gruesome deaths. Those were usually the horror series which to me seemed popular like my favorite classic, Scary Stories to Tell Yourself in the Dark. That fuckin artwork, man, still gives me chills. Felt like it gave rise to the Goosebumps series. That was in the 80's/90s. I am sure they would not allow these books in many (most?) schools any more. Shame. Anyways, to read more turn to page 47...

You died.

Here's another book from my childhood that I never forgot (before reading the solution in Wikipedia, consider buying the book used and trying it yourself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book)

We used to pore over it for hours trying to figure out anything- noticing certain patterns across the images.