choose your own adventure

i posted this because on being reminded of the books tonight it struck me, more than at any other time, what a fucking idea it was. it's not surprising that queneau was (apparently) one of the first to do something like it. (but apparently, from the hypertexted version, 'story as you like it' puts the narrator into conversation with you, who are outside the story and declare choices about e.g. your preferences? which is obv. different from you being the main actor of the narration.) is that really true that he was? if so, then still i'm shocked that it took until the 1970s for something like choose your own adventure books to come into being.

strange also that the basic formal idea doesn't seem to have been taken up a) by 'serious' or even 'trash' 'adult' (i.e. not for children) writers - like, choose your own adventure spy novels, etc. b) writers writing books where plot is similarly guided by reader choices, but in the third person instead of second person (would that somehow take away an important part of the pleasure of choosing?). why do you suppose it wasn't? (or -has- it been tried out by others? obviously 'hypertext' is one possible answer to a way in which the techniques were adapted, in which case the answer is, yes, it has been tried, and no one liked it.)

man, i meant to ask some of these questions an age ago.

kim newman's 'life's lottery' is a fairly 'serious' adult version: moreso than newman's other books, which have titles like dracula cha cha cha.

i think the bit you are missing w/r/t adult versions is the massive crossover with fantasy roleplaying - the basic format was used for solo adventures for Tunnels and Trolls (early D&D ripoff, late 70s*) then at least in england massively popularised by ian livingstone and steve jackson's Fighting Fantasy gamebooks; these then spawned eight million lesser imitations, many of which for some reason were pitched halfway between ninja and elves. (like in a random issue of white dwarf from the mid-80s i found adverts for six or seven different kinds, including "the only fantasy gamebook licensed by the tolkien estate".) anyway: the FRP crowd (or a very vocal minority of it) HATED these things, thought they were dumbing down their own dumb hobby.

*actually it was probably one of these that was the first commercial attempt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Castle

so that is: the main way in which these techniques were adapted that i know of was with stuff with at least one tangent to the RPG crowd, and that (at least over here) a more "grown up" version would have had to wait a fair while so as to avoid not being tarred with that brush in a massive way.

i used to love all these things, obviously.

Loved these books.

Choose Your Own Adventure Books!!!!

hm, i suppose that's possible, tom.

i recall reading some books of that sort (a zork book, maybe a lone wolf book now since looking up to confirm) but they didn't really do it for me (must not have if i didn't read more of them): in particular, too much bookkeeping for reading a fucking book. (and this was from a child with a d&d set who liked the mechanical part of it.)

I would always be racked with guilt if my choices led to the main character (with whom I identified) to be cast in to a pit of snakes. I believe this has impacted my ability to make self-directing decisions as an adult. In fact, I'm even a little afraid to post this.

*wracked

i liked to work them out backwards, and figure out all the possible paths so i could "beat" the book. also, i just liked to flip around through the back of the book and read all the ending pages. i never had the patience to work my way through a whole adventure properly, or only until i hit the first easy death maybe.

i liked the intergalactic spy series a bunch too -- i could solve the puzzles so i played 'em straight.

i guess they encouraged me to look at books as problems to be solved and fed my "hop to the end first then go back to the middle" tendency.

Oh, I need to post long and hard to this, I suppose, but I don't have it in me right now.

I need to re-check "Twisty Little Passages" to see if it goes into the history of CYOA books at all, which I think it does -- and the idea of nodal literature (I'm pretty sure this was a 19th C. crazy idea?) in general. I feel like CYOA comes after Adventure/Colossal Cave but I'm not sure -- neither seem directly indebted to "Story As You Like It", which I've always heard was the first CYOA-type story, although to be sure it doesn't quite follow the classic CYOA mode.

There were some CYOA romance books put out a few years ago.

Also U&K Celesteville's heartbreaking song "R.A. Montgomery", which is available on this album and is about that CYOA author's beautiful moral vision of the world.

I used to read them straight through. In fact, I remember once writing a post on a mailing list which was done in CYOA style, but also made sense if you read it straight (and included paragraphs which were unreachable reading it any other way)