
Maps Reveal the Hidden Structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books (2017) - dcminter
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cyoa-choose-your-own-adventure-maps
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ben7799
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.

~~~
powrtoch
Re CYOA/RPG combo, I believe you're referring to the Fighting Fantasy series:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy](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.

~~~
lsaferite
There is also Fabled Lands
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

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013a
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...](http://www.powerpyx.com/wp-content/uploads/detroit-
hostage-100.jpg)

~~~
louisch
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.

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germinalphrase
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.

~~~
reificator
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.

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gundmc
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.

~~~
mfoy_
[https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/black-
mirr...](https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/black-
mirror/d/d8/Bandersnatch_Map_IGN_2.jpg) (EDIT: Disclaimer... spoilers,
obviously)

In my opinion it did feel superficial because a lot of the decision paths
collapsed or dead-ended immediately.

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thom
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.

~~~
bloopernova
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.

~~~
thom
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.

~~~
shantly
There are lots of systems around, many aimed at simpler and more story-focused
play than D&D. Downside is they usually have fewer resources for DMs so you'll
be making your own campaigns, designing your own encounters, and so on, more
often, even if you'd rather not. Though 5e and Pathfinder 2.0 streamline
things quite a bit and do a better job of putting class flavor into the system
itself and working at keeping the combat system more fluid and engaging for
the whole table.

There's been an explosion of simple RPG systems focused on younger players, so
if the kids you're targeting might get lost in or bored by the rules of even a
modernized D&D-alike, there are lots of specialized kid-friendly options.
Example of one with fairly high production values if you want a take-out-of-
the-box-and-play experience, targeting really young kids:

[http://www.nothankyouevil.com](http://www.nothankyouevil.com)

I've not played it but it seems pretty well-regarded and I've seen it
mentioned a lot. Just an example, there are tons, many of them of the self-
published PDF-book-and-character-sheets variety.

------
thinkingemote
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.

~~~
ThinkingGuy
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.

~~~
baby
That’s because the system is too simple. What you want is something that
remembers your choices while taking the same path most of the time (like a
telltale game). This is not possible if you can’t keep state.

Some games do this by associating objects with path you take, when you reach a
branch they’ll tell you “if you have object X, go to page Y, otherwise go to
Z”

I’ve never seen this but you might be able to do this with a jumptable at the
end of the book that changes arithmetically according to your choice

------
ggambetta
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...](https://mobile.twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/1042537418983825408)

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a2tech
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.

~~~
nkrisc
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.

------
scandox
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_F.E.A.R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_F.E.A.R).

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johnwheeler
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.

------
celeritascelery
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.

------
wendelscardua
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)

------
SeanLuke
I just bought a Choose Your Own Adventure book a few days ago: it has exactly
this graph on its back cover now.

------
KasianFranks
I read these. They helped improve building search engines. Hidden
relationships are what it's all about.

------
macintux
I was introduced to Twine recently here on HN; seems relevant:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771022)

[https://twinery.org](https://twinery.org)

------
ganzuul
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...

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anigbrowl
If you think this is fun, wait until you start mapping your own code.

------
graigp
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

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mnw21cam
The article is fairly useless without the pictures they are describing.

~~~
tclancy
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