13 ms·

Maps reveal the structures of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books

379 points by oska 9y ago

thinkingemote 9y ago
When I was playing/reading these (e.g. Livingstone's) as a child I found a pattern. Always choose the lower number if you are unsure. (Or higher if that worked, and if it does work, stick with it). I'd like to compare those maps now.
ctack 9y ago
My strongest memory of these is lots of endings, almost exclusively bad endings and vanishingly little reading.
- raleighm 9y ago
  There's a tumblr of those endings. http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/ http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/
harryf 9y ago
Shame they didn't map some of the Fighting Fantasy books ( http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ ) or Steve Jackson's Sorcery Series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery! - now made into a series of mobile apps http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ ). Jackson & Livingstone really pushed this format far more than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Most of all I remember "Creature of Havoc" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc ) as being amazing and extremely hard. Instead of being an adventurer you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence. It employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door". One of those puzzles still has people discussing it http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html ( contains spoilers ). At 13 years old it took me and a friend 2-3 months to finally crack it.
- endgame 9y ago
  The biggest one I ever was was the (planned) 12-book Fabled Lands series (of which 5 were published), where you'd be directed to pages in other volumes as you roamed the land, and you had to keep track of code words (i.e., boolean flags) as you did things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands
  - mysterydip 9y ago
    Related, here's the flowchart for the first fabled lands book, contrast it with the CYOA ones in the article: http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.html?m=1 http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.ht...
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  oh my god, Creature of Havoc was insane. Never felt like I got close to completing it.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Or the adventures of Lone Wolf
  - euyyn 9y ago
    Those were awesome.
  - smueller1234 9y ago
    The other day, I found out that those are freely available nowadays. Somebody even made them into an android app (also free).
  - voyou 9y ago
    Project Aon has all the Lone Wolf books in a variety of formats, including a machine readable format, which they have used to produce similar diagrams of the books' structures. Joe Dever have them permission to distribute the books for free some years ago (you can also now buy them as ebooks, I think). They're all at https://www.projectaon.org/ https://www.projectaon.org/
mathw 9y ago
I used to keep a log so I could backtrack when I hit a terrible ending. I implemented savegames. Or I was maze-solving. Probably both.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Or savescumming ;)
lukasb 9y ago
They mention "Inside UFO 54-40" but don't have a graph for it :( which is a shame because it would have been the only disconnected graph
- gilgoomesh 9y ago
  Like everyone else who read that book enough to understand the Ultima gimmick, I have a simultaneous love/loathing for that book.
assert 9y ago
TL;DR: map with crappy AI payoffs here: https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/master/Misc/Payoffs.png https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/maste... As a kid, I played 'City of Thieves' by Ian Livingstone. When entering that city, there is a crossing and one can pick three roads, all leading to the same city market. I always wondered: what is the best route of the three? To do so, I first ported 'City Of Thieves' to console and desktop and Nintendo DS (after mailing the book company for permission, which I got). Then I wrote an AI that assigns payoffs to the different chapters. Not only did this result in such a map, but also the payoff it assigns to each chapter: https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/master/Misc/Payoffs.png https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/maste... The question is still unsolved though, as I do not trust the implementation of the AI :-)
- pxndx 9y ago
  This is just a giant transparent png file. Am I missing anything?
  - assert 9y ago
    Indeed, it is rather sparse. It goes from up to down, mostly staying in the center.
- dkersten 9y ago
  Oh man! City of Thieves was probably my favourite fighting fantasy book. I loved the feeling of "open world" the town gave you, despite being a book.
jcahill 9y ago
Notable exception: Meanwhile… (2001). Web blurb, slightly different from print⁽¹⁾ ____________________ Meanwhile began as a series of seven increasingly complex flowcharts. Once the outline of the story was structured, a computer algorithm determined the most efficient way to transfer it to book form, using a system of tabs to interlink the panels and pages. The problem proved to be NP-complete; it was finally cracked in spring of 2000, with the aid of a V-opt heuristic algorithm which ran for twelve hours on an SGI machine. ____________________ ¹ http://zarfhome.com/meanwhile http://zarfhome.com/meanwhile
rumcajz 9y ago
I want to write a book about crypto for kids using the similar idea. The map will be more linear-ish, or rather one mail path with side loops -- imagine passing levels in a game, you are provided ways to practice a new skill until you are able to pass to new level. More interestingly, the progress through the book can be itself constrained by a kind of crypto. The chapters in the book will be numbered and ordered at random. At the end of each chapter it will say "goto chapter 234." or "goto chapter 34 mod 12" Now imagine the player wants to cheat and starts with a random chapter in the middle of the book. He won't be able to find previous chapter (it's kind of a one-way function). Morever, if progress to chapter N+1 is gated by a puzzle that requires skill learned in chapter N-1, he can't move forward either. Some initial notes are here: https://github.com/sustrik/crypto-for-kids https://github.com/sustrik/crypto-for-kids
- jc123 9y ago
  Nit: recipient is the correct spelling for the book. Will keep eye on this.
- harryf 9y ago
  Very cool idea. I've often thought this approach would work best for teaching kids programming. Instead of "Chapter 1: Strings" present programming bit-by-bit as a mystery (detective or spy) story - you need to write simple bits of code to proceed to the next step BTW have you looked at tools like http://twinery.org/ http://twinery.org/ ? I might help you organise the content (although perhaps not with random ordering)
  - rumcajz 9y ago
    Thanks. I'll take a look.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Back in the day there was a kids' book called I believe Chip Rogers: Computer Whiz. The kids in the book were amateur detectives with computing as a hobby. One of them, the titular Chip Rogers, would write a BASIC program -- the text of which is in the book -- to analyze the clues and logically deduce the culprit of the crime. You could keep reading, or enter the program yourself to solve the mystery before the protagonists do.
b0rsuk 9y ago
It's interesting that almost all choices in "Choose your own adventure" are binary. They are, with few exceptions, binary trees. There can only be more than 2 choices if children of the node are leaf nodes (endings). A very simple way to keep number of branches reasonably low.
- e12e 9y ago
  > There can only be more than 2 choices if children of the node are leaf nodes (endings). Huh? Lets say each node is a page, and the book is 256 pages. I don't see why the graph could be any (cyclic) or not graph? True, binary choices probably makes it easier to make an easy, and natural feeling narrative - but I don't see this as a hard limitation? I mean, in the extreme case (with one very long first page) you could have a "2-page" story with beginning, and 255 alternate endings? And you could modify that, so that 254 lead back to the first page, with an additional hint... [ed: See the map for "cup of death" for an actual book that uses "four road fork". It is curious that all of these concrete books seem to use binary choices. I can't remember the CYA books I read when I was a kid (Author, name of series) - but I seem to recall there was frequently three, four choices - often one or more choice would loop back (often literally, as in a path that forked around and led you back to an earlier fork in the road...).]
bcyn 9y ago
I'm sad they didn't include the Goosebumps books, I loved those when I was a kid.
Shivetya 9y ago
So much of the computer adventure gaming / MMO style could benefit from understanding how these books worked. Everything is so linear these days with no failed paths. While some games may present choices you can usually find a strategy guide that shows all the ones that will fail as everything is fixed. Still the maps match up with a lot of the examples I have seen of flow charts/maps/grids from authors who scope out their stories and then fill in where its important and interesting with the actual text we get to read
- jug 9y ago
  I wonder how much of this is due to poor understanding vs lower effort to save development costs.
  - tetraca 9y ago
    I always thought it was a matter of economy more than anything else. If all you need to do is produce text it's very "easy" to build a massive branching storyline with lots of failure conditions and truly modifying developments since text is cheap. When each of these branches also need additional hours of voice acting, more characters to design and animate, more locations to model, etc it becomes increasingly expensive to make a storyline that has strongly branching paths. There was a time where there was a nice sweet spot that allowed for a decent amount of creativity and branching and opportunity for failure, but as games started to have more and more of these details, developers started making choices more minor, making choices that are illusory, and building at most 2-3 endings that only really branch very late game or mostly rely on mechanics (oftentimes how many people you killed) so that there is less that needs to be adjusted in terms of plot. Secondarily, you also likely have pressure to make a game that is enjoyable for as long as possible and caters to as many people as possible, which discourages building/allowing critical failure points like the pie in King's Quest V, and maybe also discourages branching too hard so that all content that can be experienced is mostly easily digestible in one playthrough (the subtext being, if you're only ever going to be paid once per user in the context of a single player game, that any path not explored by most people is essentially a massive waste of money so the experience should be streamlined to a tunnel as far as possible to a cost limit the minimum expected adventure).
Im_a_throw_away 9y ago
Any good "choose your own adventure" book you would recommend for adults?
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  Fighting fantasy books by Steve Jackson. More teen than adult but a significant step up from classic CYOA.
- setq 9y ago
  Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier is the only one I've gone through and it was quite good.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- krisoft 9y ago
  I don't know about _book_ books, but if I take your question more generally to mean any interactive fiction, then I would heartily recommend Counterfeit Monkey from Emily Short, or the 80 Days from Inkle. Both are a beauty in their respective styles, and was great fun to play with.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  I've not read it yet, but the pop-culture/horror writer (and film critic) Kim Newman has a choose your own adventure book called Life's Lottery that lets you make life desicions for the protagonist as he grows up starting from childhood in 1960s England. It gets good reviews on Amazon and his stuff is usually good.
  - hyper_reality 9y ago
    I highly recommend Life's Lottery. It's a nostalgic return to 80's Britain that should be entertaining even for anyone who didn't live through those years. The fact that you control the choices of a person from childhood to adulthood, with astonishingly different outcomes depending on those choices, has the sublime effect of making you consider the direction your real life is going, and how your everyday trivial decisions shape it. Sometimes what appears to be a minor choice or even an evil decision can lead to a better outcome than the alternative. New paperback and ebook editions were released a few years ago.
dustingetz 9y ago
It raises some interesting questions. To vizualize a program in a useful way, is it an exercise in what you can take away? Take away everything so all you are left with is text nodes and links, and that is something easy to visualize. This is all so obvious but it never solidified concretely like this for me until now. The following domains have a bunch of stuff taken away from them, you're left with a narrow domain of very few concepts, and once narrowed it is intuitive to make a visual tool: webforms - google forms relational forms - airtable computer aided design music - OneNote mathematica video games - unity website - squarespace crud app - hyperfiddle.net world wide web - internet explorer, or html Functional programming may be a way to narrow down the set of "all programs" to a few primitives that can be modeled visually, but not take away so much that it is not useful for general purpose programs. Maybe visualizing pure expressions as a tree of function calls or as an execution graph. IDEs can already do this for imperative & object oriented programs, but you end up with a hairball, the visualization is not useful enough that we no longer need, for example, to write code in files. What other ways can we attack a large domain like "enterprise business apps" and take things away until left with a few simple composable primitives?
- Retric 9y ago
  I once wrote a static analysis tool that simply made 2 lists for every function. What Object-function it called, and what Object-functions called it. It only mapped around 98% of all calls, but ended up being extremely useful abstraction when handed a huge code base without much documentation or access to the old team.
  - justinnhli 9y ago
    These are called call graphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph
setq 9y ago
Inspired by this type of book, I used to write BBC BASIC adventure games in the late 1980's at school. It was great fun planning the structure of them on paper and coming up with the graphs first.
Erwin 9y ago
If your nostalgia makes you yearn for this type of game with relatively limited choices, the "80 days" game (perfect for the iPad but now also PC/android) is fantastic: it's a Steampunk twist on the Vernes story (so rockets are a valid form of transportation!) and has excellent world building and great writing -- as good as my other verbose favorites: Witcher 3, Planescape Torment and Betrayal at Krondor. A play-through can be attempted very quickly, every time experiencing something new -- you are racing through the world attempting to return to London in 80 days. The creator, Inkle, have a more traditional RPG, Sorcery. Also good for re-creating feel of a classic D&D adventure, but I enjoyed encountering automatons in Vienna in "80 Days" more.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  80 Days is excellent. I've played through it three times myself. I highly recommend it.
im3w1l 9y ago
If you like CYOA and programming, you should check out Ren'py. It's a python engine for creating digital CYOA stories. Wikipedia tells me that over a thousand games have been created with it.
- userbinator 9y ago
  The Japanese have been quite fond of the CYOA concept for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel There are far more of those in Japanese than English or any other language.
  - the_af 9y ago
    I loved the CYOA books of my youth, and still enjoyed some Fighting Fantasy books as an adult (Sorcery! for iOS and The Forest of Doom for Linux are great), but I find Japanese "visual novels" dreadfully boring. The ones I've played consist mostly of dialogue of endlessly repeating "...", and almost no choice at all, just clicking some predetermined dialogue to advance the story. Usually with terrible writing, too. Neither games nor novels -- the worst of both worlds, in my opinion.
  - jhanschoo 9y ago
    Written probably around a decade ago, I found this informal history of visual novels very interesting http://archive.is/HD0Z http://archive.is/HD0Z
scirocco 9y ago
For a long time I've thought about having a similar map but for research. Imagining seeing which work builds on what, how they relate and easily scroll to the right to see the latest topics in that field.
- abakker 9y ago
  This is called mind-mapping. In my research I use them extensively. simple mind is the program I use for it, though there are plenty of others.
ggambetta 9y ago
Reminds me of a CYO-style game for iPad I was the lead developer for. After we were done I added some code to output the graph structure of the game, rendered it with GraphViz, and gave it to the artist, who came up with this: https://twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/455184159401472000 https://twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/455184159401472000
neonhomer 9y ago
For anyone who's feeling nostalgic and wants a quick (or long) choose your own adventure, http://chooseyourstory.com/ http://chooseyourstory.com/ has some interesting stories. I really enjoyed http://chooseyourstory.com/story/ground-zero http://chooseyourstory.com/story/ground-zero and http://chooseyourstory.com/story/dead-man-walking-(zombie-survival) http://chooseyourstory.com/story/dead-man-walking-(zombie-su...
Markoff 9y ago
can you recommend some similar Android games with CYOA similar to Lifeline preferably without waiting?
cossatot 9y ago
It's interesting to me how infrequently different paths link up. Alhough this is obviously the point of the book series, it still embodies a set of assumptions about free will vs. predestination/inevitability. Maybe there could be some choose your own crime books where a lot of the outcomes end in jail. I only read a few of these way back when, so I don't remember exactly if this happened, but another possible take would be a sort of 'where were you when the big [whatever] happened'. How do different choices early on determine how you're affected by the Plague/ day Dublin's streets ran with Guinness/ Chicxulub impact.
- tripzilch 9y ago
  I'm not really that familiar with CYOA books, but couldn't they not have different outcomes end in jail, which are still different pages, just described differently (if told through the eyes of the main character, for instance depending on their previous experiences)? The outcome would be basically the same, but the book would offer a richer reading experience for it, and you wouldn't see any linked up graphs.
ForRealsies 9y ago
I'd like someone to map a digital variable based novel like Samurai of Hyuga. https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/samurai-of-hyuga/ https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/samurai-of-hy...
exelius 9y ago
I loved these books as a child. I had always wanted to play a video game that worked this way; which I guess is why I am such a fan of the BioWare style of games.
tenkabuto 9y ago
Seeing discussions here, I now realize that one could write a work of fiction firstly as though it were a CYOA, allowing the writer to explore various potential threads and ultimately choose to present in a final copy the chosen path (chosen due to its degree of intrigue/drama/oddity/etc.). I have attempted to write stories before but I would get stuck with thinking "OK, where should I go from here?", which I see, from this CYOA perspective, is more of an editor's perspective than a creative perspective; the creative perspective can be allowed for with the exploration of various tracks/paths and the editor perspective can come into play once those have been fleshed out.
- failrate 9y ago
  Write it as a CYOA. Then, have it web hosted. Have your test readers go through it. Track their choices. Publish a book based on selecting only the highest trafficked choice for each node.
rumcajz 9y ago
Interesting that nobody mentioned Borges here. Labyrinthine books are one of the recurring themes in his writing. In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending.
- ShardPhoenix 9y ago
  >In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending. Some games work like this (eg Dragon Age: Origins). It's not as mysterious as it sounds.
trevman 9y ago
If you liked this, you might like this data analysis of CYOA: http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/ http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/
luke0016 9y ago
It's fun to look for cycles. Looks like "Space and Beyond," "Journey under the Sea," and "By Balloon to the Sahara" could each provide a lifetime of reading...
- SilasX 9y ago
  Similarly, I remember one of them having an unreachable node (graph theory: "a second component") so you had to "win" by finding the award page directly and just reading it, where it congratulates you for thinking outside the box.
odammit 9y ago
My school had a program where you would get a free pizza from Pizza Hut for every ten books you read. I didn't like the idea of lying about reading but I was OK with gaming the system by reading 'choose your own adventure' books. I would pick the dumbest options because I knew it was likely I'd die fast and the book would be over.
- lostcolony 9y ago
  My school had the 'Accelerated Reader' program; read a book, take a test. Teachers started making it so your grade for reading was based on how many AR points you collected. Problem was, I was reading mostly adult books at that point, and they didn't have any tests for those. However, I realized that the tests were both multiple choice, and -didn't penalize you for wrong answers- (or if they did, it was fractional, i.e., 4 possible answers, a wrong one was -1/4, a positive one was +1, so doing just slightly better than random chance would give you a positive score). So I started taking them for books I'd never read, and just guessing.
  - resu_nimda 9y ago
    At one point I searched for the book worth the most points in our system, and it was Les Miserables, at around 125 points. That was more than twice the value of any other book and enough points for the whole year with a good score on the test. So I went out and got the full unabridged hardcover version - a stupidly massive and ponderous tome for a 5th grader - and I didn't even make it past the opening digression to where the plot actually starts. I then picked up a little abridged version, breezed through it, and easily passed the simple multiple-choice test. Looking back, there was really no reason for that book to be in there.
- SilasX 9y ago
  Yes! I remember that program! I think it was called "Book it!" so I google it and found their page: http://www.bookitprogram.com/ http://www.bookitprogram.com/
  - failrate 9y ago
vinbreau 9y ago
As a kid I began to map my CYA books in a similar fashion. I wanted to write my own and so would mimic the structure of the books I had. Twelve year old me would have loved nice clean maps like these. I'm sure mine were nowhere as neat.
- failrate 9y ago
  Did you ever write one?
tdeck 9y ago
I was thinking rather sadly recently that I'm probably in the last generation that has heard of these and will get the reference. The Choose Your Own Adventure books are a great analogy for certain programming topics but if young people have never heard of them it doesn't do much good. That said, they were pretty mediocre fiction as I recall it.
- taeric 9y ago
  Did you see https://smile.amazon.com/Neil-Patrick-Harris-Choose-Autobiography/dp/B00O4GRDBA https://smile.amazon.com/Neil-Patrick-Harris-Choose-Autobiog...? Lot of fun with this idea.
- lsaferite 9y ago
  They are doing new books targeted to a younger audience. My 7 y/o has been reading them since he started school. https://www.cyoa.com/collections/dragonlarks https://www.cyoa.com/collections/dragonlarks
hcs 9y ago
Interesting, so many analyses of these structures! One more that I don't think was reachable from the article is on the blog These Heterogenous Tasks: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/ https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...
ZanyProgrammer 9y ago
I think my favorite CYOA books were the Escape series. I also remember playing a video game version of Escape on a neighbors Commodore 64.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
I bought Choose Your Own Adventure books when they first came out. I went through my old book collection and it turns out I have Cave of Time, First printing. Obviously worthless but still a testament to how memorable it was for a kid.
- tunesmith 9y ago
  On the CYOA site you can buy old CYOA books for more than $20 apiece, so it might be worth something.
Rudism 9y ago
I spent some time a while ago developing my own system to create CYOA books based on Markdown (called Ficdown). The goal was to develop a simple way to write books without having to write code, and that could be exported to normal e-book formats like epub, mobi, or html with clickable links used to make your decisions as you read the book. I ran into a lot of unexpected technical complexities in the compilation step, for example trying to remove unreachable branches of the story, and optimizing situations where branches merged back together, or removing variables that were being tracked that no longer had any effect on the story from that point on. It was a fun exercise. It makes me wonder how earlier CYOA books and series were actually written. How hard was it to keep track of the various branching plot lines? Were there ever cases where "bugs" were published? I was a massive fan of CYOA, especially Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series.
- galago 9y ago
  Not a "bug" but a feature: Inside UFO 54-40 had an ending that you couldn't reach by the normal means. You had to just flip through (cheat?) to find it. The ending was: "No one can chose to visit Ultima," says Elinka. "Nor can you get here by following directions. It was a miracle you got here, but that is perfectly logical, because Ultima is a miracle in itself." The End
  - phjesusthatguy3 9y ago
    Kibo of alt.religion.kibology posted a Christmas themed CYOA to the group decades ago, and the only winning ending was deliberately unreachable.
- failrate 9y ago
  Try using Twine. It makes creating CYOA browser games easy.
rmidthun 9y ago
CYOA still lives, but in different forms. Japanese Visual Novels are basically CYOA with pictures. The number of decision points varies depending on the book in question, but the basic structure is still there. Twine [1] is a system that allows you to create stories, essentially CYOA but with the option of adding variables. For instance, you could have an option that is only selectable if you found a key earlier. This bridges the gap between CYOA and classic text adventure. Since Twine outputs HTML it is also easy to port wherever you want. Finally, there are a number of online community CYOA. This being the Internet, the quality is varied and many of them are pornographic. Probably the biggest is Addventure[2] [1] http://twinery.org/ http://twinery.org/ [2] http://www.addventure.com/ http://www.addventure.com/
jamesmintram 9y ago
Fighting Fantasy... Just gonna leave this here: http://nomadgames.co.uk/fightingfantasy/ http://nomadgames.co.uk/fightingfantasy/ (Disclosure: I am one of the programmers)
allenu 9y ago
Choose Your Own Adventure and text-based adventure games you type into your computer (with BASIC) really got me into computers as a kid back in the late 80s/early 90s. I wrote my own gamebooks using a simple notepad and "turn to page XXX"-style narratives. In the end, they are just programs that you follow. :) To this day, I'm still fascinated by them and recently wrote some sites that let you create CYOA-style adventures yourself and with others; http://www.thiswayorthat.club http://www.thiswayorthat.club is one of them.
addled 9y ago
I had forgotten all about COYA books until recently, when I was at a yard sale and found Twist-a-Plot's "Calling Outer Space". I had never heard of it but instantly knew I had to have it as soon as I saw that crazy cover. I've had a blast reading this together with my 7 year old son.
ropable 9y ago
There was another CYOA series called Way of the Tiger by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson where you played a ninja. They were pretty unforgiving and graphic. My younger self enjoyed those enough that I was inspired to convert the first one into a web application a few years ago: https://ropable.com/avenger/ https://ropable.com/avenger/

379 points by oska 9y ago

When I was playing/reading these (e.g. Livingstone's) as a child I found a pattern. Always choose the lower number if you are unsure. (Or higher if that worked, and if it does work, stick with it). I'd like to compare those maps now.

ctack 9y ago

My strongest memory of these is lots of endings, almost exclusively bad endings and vanishingly little reading.

raleighm 9y ago
There's a tumblr of those endings. http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/ http://youchosewrong.tumblr.com/

harryf 9y ago

Shame they didn't map some of the Fighting Fantasy books ( http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ http://www.fightingfantasy.com/ ) or Steve Jackson's Sorcery Series ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcery! - now made into a series of mobile apps http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/ ). Jackson & Livingstone really pushed this format far more than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Most of all I remember "Creature of Havoc" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_of_Havoc ) as being amazing and extremely hard. Instead of being an adventurer you play a monster with limited IQ forced to unravel the mystery of your own existence. It employed various techniques that prevented cheating like "If you have the key, add the number written on the key to this page number to open the door". One of those puzzles still has people discussing it http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/creatureofhavoc.html ( contains spoilers ). At 13 years old it took me and a friend 2-3 months to finally crack it.

endgame 9y ago
The biggest one I ever was was the (planned) 12-book Fabled Lands series (of which 5 were published), where you'd be directed to pages in other volumes as you roamed the land, and you had to keep track of code words (i.e., boolean flags) as you did things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabled_Lands
- mysterydip 9y ago
  Related, here's the flowchart for the first fabled lands book, contrast it with the CYOA ones in the article: http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.html?m=1 http://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2011/12/shape-of-universe.ht...
Quarrelsome 9y ago
oh my god, Creature of Havoc was insane. Never felt like I got close to completing it.
LoSboccacc 9y ago
Or the adventures of Lone Wolf
- euyyn 9y ago
  Those were awesome.
- smueller1234 9y ago
  The other day, I found out that those are freely available nowadays. Somebody even made them into an android app (also free).
- voyou 9y ago
  Project Aon has all the Lone Wolf books in a variety of formats, including a machine readable format, which they have used to produce similar diagrams of the books' structures. Joe Dever have them permission to distribute the books for free some years ago (you can also now buy them as ebooks, I think). They're all at https://www.projectaon.org/ https://www.projectaon.org/

mathw 9y ago

I used to keep a log so I could backtrack when I hit a terrible ending. I implemented savegames. Or I was maze-solving. Probably both.

Bakary 9y ago
Or savescumming ;)

lukasb 9y ago

They mention "Inside UFO 54-40" but don't have a graph for it :( which is a shame because it would have been the only disconnected graph

gilgoomesh 9y ago
Like everyone else who read that book enough to understand the Ultima gimmick, I have a simultaneous love/loathing for that book.

assert 9y ago

TL;DR: map with crappy AI payoffs here: https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/master/Misc/Payoffs.png https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/maste... As a kid, I played 'City of Thieves' by Ian Livingstone. When entering that city, there is a crossing and one can pick three roads, all leading to the same city market. I always wondered: what is the best route of the three? To do so, I first ported 'City Of Thieves' to console and desktop and Nintendo DS (after mailing the book company for permission, which I got). Then I wrote an AI that assigns payoffs to the different chapters. Not only did this result in such a map, but also the payoff it assigns to each chapter: https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/master/Misc/Payoffs.png https://github.com/richelbilderbeek/CityOfThieves/blob/maste... The question is still unsolved though, as I do not trust the implementation of the AI :-)

pxndx 9y ago
This is just a giant transparent png file. Am I missing anything?
- assert 9y ago
  Indeed, it is rather sparse. It goes from up to down, mostly staying in the center.
dkersten 9y ago
Oh man! City of Thieves was probably my favourite fighting fantasy book. I loved the feeling of "open world" the town gave you, despite being a book.

jcahill 9y ago

Notable exception: Meanwhile… (2001). Web blurb, slightly different from print⁽¹⁾ ____________________ Meanwhile began as a series of seven increasingly complex flowcharts. Once the outline of the story was structured, a computer algorithm determined the most efficient way to transfer it to book form, using a system of tabs to interlink the panels and pages. The problem proved to be NP-complete; it was finally cracked in spring of 2000, with the aid of a V-opt heuristic algorithm which ran for twelve hours on an SGI machine. ____________________ ¹ http://zarfhome.com/meanwhile http://zarfhome.com/meanwhile

rumcajz 9y ago

I want to write a book about crypto for kids using the similar idea. The map will be more linear-ish, or rather one mail path with side loops -- imagine passing levels in a game, you are provided ways to practice a new skill until you are able to pass to new level. More interestingly, the progress through the book can be itself constrained by a kind of crypto. The chapters in the book will be numbered and ordered at random. At the end of each chapter it will say "goto chapter 234." or "goto chapter 34 mod 12" Now imagine the player wants to cheat and starts with a random chapter in the middle of the book. He won't be able to find previous chapter (it's kind of a one-way function). Morever, if progress to chapter N+1 is gated by a puzzle that requires skill learned in chapter N-1, he can't move forward either. Some initial notes are here: https://github.com/sustrik/crypto-for-kids https://github.com/sustrik/crypto-for-kids

jc123 9y ago
Nit: recipient is the correct spelling for the book. Will keep eye on this.
harryf 9y ago
Very cool idea. I've often thought this approach would work best for teaching kids programming. Instead of "Chapter 1: Strings" present programming bit-by-bit as a mystery (detective or spy) story - you need to write simple bits of code to proceed to the next step BTW have you looked at tools like http://twinery.org/ http://twinery.org/ ? I might help you organise the content (although perhaps not with random ordering)
- rumcajz 9y ago
  Thanks. I'll take a look.
- bitwize 9y ago
  Back in the day there was a kids' book called I believe Chip Rogers: Computer Whiz. The kids in the book were amateur detectives with computing as a hobby. One of them, the titular Chip Rogers, would write a BASIC program -- the text of which is in the book -- to analyze the clues and logically deduce the culprit of the crime. You could keep reading, or enter the program yourself to solve the mystery before the protagonists do.

b0rsuk 9y ago

It's interesting that almost all choices in "Choose your own adventure" are binary. They are, with few exceptions, binary trees. There can only be more than 2 choices if children of the node are leaf nodes (endings). A very simple way to keep number of branches reasonably low.

e12e 9y ago
> There can only be more than 2 choices if children of the node are leaf nodes (endings). Huh? Lets say each node is a page, and the book is 256 pages. I don't see why the graph could be any (cyclic) or not graph? True, binary choices probably makes it easier to make an easy, and natural feeling narrative - but I don't see this as a hard limitation? I mean, in the extreme case (with one very long first page) you could have a "2-page" story with beginning, and 255 alternate endings? And you could modify that, so that 254 lead back to the first page, with an additional hint... [ed: See the map for "cup of death" for an actual book that uses "four road fork". It is curious that all of these concrete books seem to use binary choices. I can't remember the CYA books I read when I was a kid (Author, name of series) - but I seem to recall there was frequently three, four choices - often one or more choice would loop back (often literally, as in a path that forked around and led you back to an earlier fork in the road...).]

bcyn 9y ago

I'm sad they didn't include the Goosebumps books, I loved those when I was a kid.

Shivetya 9y ago

So much of the computer adventure gaming / MMO style could benefit from understanding how these books worked. Everything is so linear these days with no failed paths. While some games may present choices you can usually find a strategy guide that shows all the ones that will fail as everything is fixed. Still the maps match up with a lot of the examples I have seen of flow charts/maps/grids from authors who scope out their stories and then fill in where its important and interesting with the actual text we get to read

jug 9y ago
I wonder how much of this is due to poor understanding vs lower effort to save development costs.
- tetraca 9y ago
  I always thought it was a matter of economy more than anything else. If all you need to do is produce text it's very "easy" to build a massive branching storyline with lots of failure conditions and truly modifying developments since text is cheap. When each of these branches also need additional hours of voice acting, more characters to design and animate, more locations to model, etc it becomes increasingly expensive to make a storyline that has strongly branching paths. There was a time where there was a nice sweet spot that allowed for a decent amount of creativity and branching and opportunity for failure, but as games started to have more and more of these details, developers started making choices more minor, making choices that are illusory, and building at most 2-3 endings that only really branch very late game or mostly rely on mechanics (oftentimes how many people you killed) so that there is less that needs to be adjusted in terms of plot. Secondarily, you also likely have pressure to make a game that is enjoyable for as long as possible and caters to as many people as possible, which discourages building/allowing critical failure points like the pie in King's Quest V, and maybe also discourages branching too hard so that all content that can be experienced is mostly easily digestible in one playthrough (the subtext being, if you're only ever going to be paid once per user in the context of a single player game, that any path not explored by most people is essentially a massive waste of money so the experience should be streamlined to a tunnel as far as possible to a cost limit the minimum expected adventure).

Im_a_throw_away 9y ago

Any good "choose your own adventure" book you would recommend for adults?

Quarrelsome 9y ago
Fighting fantasy books by Steve Jackson. More teen than adult but a significant step up from classic CYOA.
setq 9y ago
Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? by Max Brallier is the only one I've gone through and it was quite good.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
krisoft 9y ago
I don't know about _book_ books, but if I take your question more generally to mean any interactive fiction, then I would heartily recommend Counterfeit Monkey from Emily Short, or the 80 Days from Inkle. Both are a beauty in their respective styles, and was great fun to play with.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I've not read it yet, but the pop-culture/horror writer (and film critic) Kim Newman has a choose your own adventure book called Life's Lottery that lets you make life desicions for the protagonist as he grows up starting from childhood in 1960s England. It gets good reviews on Amazon and his stuff is usually good.
- hyper_reality 9y ago
  I highly recommend Life's Lottery. It's a nostalgic return to 80's Britain that should be entertaining even for anyone who didn't live through those years. The fact that you control the choices of a person from childhood to adulthood, with astonishingly different outcomes depending on those choices, has the sublime effect of making you consider the direction your real life is going, and how your everyday trivial decisions shape it. Sometimes what appears to be a minor choice or even an evil decision can lead to a better outcome than the alternative. New paperback and ebook editions were released a few years ago.

dustingetz 9y ago

It raises some interesting questions. To vizualize a program in a useful way, is it an exercise in what you can take away? Take away everything so all you are left with is text nodes and links, and that is something easy to visualize. This is all so obvious but it never solidified concretely like this for me until now. The following domains have a bunch of stuff taken away from them, you're left with a narrow domain of very few concepts, and once narrowed it is intuitive to make a visual tool: webforms - google forms relational forms - airtable computer aided design music - OneNote mathematica video games - unity website - squarespace crud app - hyperfiddle.net world wide web - internet explorer, or html Functional programming may be a way to narrow down the set of "all programs" to a few primitives that can be modeled visually, but not take away so much that it is not useful for general purpose programs. Maybe visualizing pure expressions as a tree of function calls or as an execution graph. IDEs can already do this for imperative & object oriented programs, but you end up with a hairball, the visualization is not useful enough that we no longer need, for example, to write code in files. What other ways can we attack a large domain like "enterprise business apps" and take things away until left with a few simple composable primitives?

Retric 9y ago
I once wrote a static analysis tool that simply made 2 lists for every function. What Object-function it called, and what Object-functions called it. It only mapped around 98% of all calls, but ended up being extremely useful abstraction when handed a huge code base without much documentation or access to the old team.
- justinnhli 9y ago
  These are called call graphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_graph

setq 9y ago

Inspired by this type of book, I used to write BBC BASIC adventure games in the late 1980's at school. It was great fun planning the structure of them on paper and coming up with the graphs first.

Erwin 9y ago

If your nostalgia makes you yearn for this type of game with relatively limited choices, the "80 days" game (perfect for the iPad but now also PC/android) is fantastic: it's a Steampunk twist on the Vernes story (so rockets are a valid form of transportation!) and has excellent world building and great writing -- as good as my other verbose favorites: Witcher 3, Planescape Torment and Betrayal at Krondor. A play-through can be attempted very quickly, every time experiencing something new -- you are racing through the world attempting to return to London in 80 days. The creator, Inkle, have a more traditional RPG, Sorcery. Also good for re-creating feel of a classic D&D adventure, but I enjoyed encountering automatons in Vienna in "80 Days" more.

cableshaft 9y ago
80 Days is excellent. I've played through it three times myself. I highly recommend it.

im3w1l 9y ago

If you like CYOA and programming, you should check out Ren'py. It's a python engine for creating digital CYOA stories. Wikipedia tells me that over a thousand games have been created with it.

userbinator 9y ago
The Japanese have been quite fond of the CYOA concept for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel There are far more of those in Japanese than English or any other language.
- the_af 9y ago
  I loved the CYOA books of my youth, and still enjoyed some Fighting Fantasy books as an adult (Sorcery! for iOS and The Forest of Doom for Linux are great), but I find Japanese "visual novels" dreadfully boring. The ones I've played consist mostly of dialogue of endlessly repeating "...", and almost no choice at all, just clicking some predetermined dialogue to advance the story. Usually with terrible writing, too. Neither games nor novels -- the worst of both worlds, in my opinion.
- jhanschoo 9y ago
  Written probably around a decade ago, I found this informal history of visual novels very interesting http://archive.is/HD0Z http://archive.is/HD0Z

scirocco 9y ago

For a long time I've thought about having a similar map but for research. Imagining seeing which work builds on what, how they relate and easily scroll to the right to see the latest topics in that field.

abakker 9y ago
This is called mind-mapping. In my research I use them extensively. simple mind is the program I use for it, though there are plenty of others.

ggambetta 9y ago

Reminds me of a CYO-style game for iPad I was the lead developer for. After we were done I added some code to output the graph structure of the game, rendered it with GraphViz, and gave it to the artist, who came up with this: https://twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/455184159401472000 https://twitter.com/rmodjeski/status/455184159401472000

neonhomer 9y ago

For anyone who's feeling nostalgic and wants a quick (or long) choose your own adventure, http://chooseyourstory.com/ http://chooseyourstory.com/ has some interesting stories. I really enjoyed http://chooseyourstory.com/story/ground-zero http://chooseyourstory.com/story/ground-zero and http://chooseyourstory.com/story/dead-man-walking-(zombie-survival) http://chooseyourstory.com/story/dead-man-walking-(zombie-su...

Markoff 9y ago

can you recommend some similar Android games with CYOA similar to Lifeline preferably without waiting?

cossatot 9y ago

It's interesting to me how infrequently different paths link up. Alhough this is obviously the point of the book series, it still embodies a set of assumptions about free will vs. predestination/inevitability. Maybe there could be some choose your own crime books where a lot of the outcomes end in jail. I only read a few of these way back when, so I don't remember exactly if this happened, but another possible take would be a sort of 'where were you when the big [whatever] happened'. How do different choices early on determine how you're affected by the Plague/ day Dublin's streets ran with Guinness/ Chicxulub impact.

tripzilch 9y ago
I'm not really that familiar with CYOA books, but couldn't they not have different outcomes end in jail, which are still different pages, just described differently (if told through the eyes of the main character, for instance depending on their previous experiences)? The outcome would be basically the same, but the book would offer a richer reading experience for it, and you wouldn't see any linked up graphs.

ForRealsies 9y ago

I'd like someone to map a digital variable based novel like Samurai of Hyuga. https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/samurai-of-hyuga/ https://www.choiceofgames.com/user-contributed/samurai-of-hy...

exelius 9y ago

I loved these books as a child. I had always wanted to play a video game that worked this way; which I guess is why I am such a fan of the BioWare style of games.

tenkabuto 9y ago

Seeing discussions here, I now realize that one could write a work of fiction firstly as though it were a CYOA, allowing the writer to explore various potential threads and ultimately choose to present in a final copy the chosen path (chosen due to its degree of intrigue/drama/oddity/etc.). I have attempted to write stories before but I would get stuck with thinking "OK, where should I go from here?", which I see, from this CYOA perspective, is more of an editor's perspective than a creative perspective; the creative perspective can be allowed for with the exploration of various tracks/paths and the editor perspective can come into play once those have been fleshed out.

failrate 9y ago
Write it as a CYOA. Then, have it web hosted. Have your test readers go through it. Track their choices. Publish a book based on selecting only the highest trafficked choice for each node.

rumcajz 9y ago

Interesting that nobody mentioned Borges here. Labyrinthine books are one of the recurring themes in his writing. In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending.

ShardPhoenix 9y ago
>In one short story he proposes a kind of reverse CYOA book: A book with many beginnings but only one ending. Some games work like this (eg Dragon Age: Origins). It's not as mysterious as it sounds.

trevman 9y ago

If you liked this, you might like this data analysis of CYOA: http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/ http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/

luke0016 9y ago

It's fun to look for cycles. Looks like "Space and Beyond," "Journey under the Sea," and "By Balloon to the Sahara" could each provide a lifetime of reading...

SilasX 9y ago
Similarly, I remember one of them having an unreachable node (graph theory: "a second component") so you had to "win" by finding the award page directly and just reading it, where it congratulates you for thinking outside the box.

odammit 9y ago

My school had a program where you would get a free pizza from Pizza Hut for every ten books you read. I didn't like the idea of lying about reading but I was OK with gaming the system by reading 'choose your own adventure' books. I would pick the dumbest options because I knew it was likely I'd die fast and the book would be over.

lostcolony 9y ago
My school had the 'Accelerated Reader' program; read a book, take a test. Teachers started making it so your grade for reading was based on how many AR points you collected. Problem was, I was reading mostly adult books at that point, and they didn't have any tests for those. However, I realized that the tests were both multiple choice, and -didn't penalize you for wrong answers- (or if they did, it was fractional, i.e., 4 possible answers, a wrong one was -1/4, a positive one was +1, so doing just slightly better than random chance would give you a positive score). So I started taking them for books I'd never read, and just guessing.
- resu_nimda 9y ago
  At one point I searched for the book worth the most points in our system, and it was Les Miserables, at around 125 points. That was more than twice the value of any other book and enough points for the whole year with a good score on the test. So I went out and got the full unabridged hardcover version - a stupidly massive and ponderous tome for a 5th grader - and I didn't even make it past the opening digression to where the plot actually starts. I then picked up a little abridged version, breezed through it, and easily passed the simple multiple-choice test. Looking back, there was really no reason for that book to be in there.
SilasX 9y ago
Yes! I remember that program! I think it was called "Book it!" so I google it and found their page: http://www.bookitprogram.com/ http://www.bookitprogram.com/
- failrate 9y ago

vinbreau 9y ago

As a kid I began to map my CYA books in a similar fashion. I wanted to write my own and so would mimic the structure of the books I had. Twelve year old me would have loved nice clean maps like these. I'm sure mine were nowhere as neat.

failrate 9y ago
Did you ever write one?

tdeck 9y ago

I was thinking rather sadly recently that I'm probably in the last generation that has heard of these and will get the reference. The Choose Your Own Adventure books are a great analogy for certain programming topics but if young people have never heard of them it doesn't do much good. That said, they were pretty mediocre fiction as I recall it.

taeric 9y ago
Did you see https://smile.amazon.com/Neil-Patrick-Harris-Choose-Autobiography/dp/B00O4GRDBA https://smile.amazon.com/Neil-Patrick-Harris-Choose-Autobiog...? Lot of fun with this idea.
lsaferite 9y ago
They are doing new books targeted to a younger audience. My 7 y/o has been reading them since he started school. https://www.cyoa.com/collections/dragonlarks https://www.cyoa.com/collections/dragonlarks

hcs 9y ago

Interesting, so many analyses of these structures! One more that I don't think was reachable from the article is on the blog These Heterogenous Tasks: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/ https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-...

ZanyProgrammer 9y ago

I think my favorite CYOA books were the Escape series. I also remember playing a video game version of Escape on a neighbors Commodore 64.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

I bought Choose Your Own Adventure books when they first came out. I went through my old book collection and it turns out I have Cave of Time, First printing. Obviously worthless but still a testament to how memorable it was for a kid.

tunesmith 9y ago
On the CYOA site you can buy old CYOA books for more than $20 apiece, so it might be worth something.

Rudism 9y ago

I spent some time a while ago developing my own system to create CYOA books based on Markdown (called Ficdown). The goal was to develop a simple way to write books without having to write code, and that could be exported to normal e-book formats like epub, mobi, or html with clickable links used to make your decisions as you read the book. I ran into a lot of unexpected technical complexities in the compilation step, for example trying to remove unreachable branches of the story, and optimizing situations where branches merged back together, or removing variables that were being tracked that no longer had any effect on the story from that point on. It was a fun exercise. It makes me wonder how earlier CYOA books and series were actually written. How hard was it to keep track of the various branching plot lines? Were there ever cases where "bugs" were published? I was a massive fan of CYOA, especially Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series.

galago 9y ago
Not a "bug" but a feature: Inside UFO 54-40 had an ending that you couldn't reach by the normal means. You had to just flip through (cheat?) to find it. The ending was: "No one can chose to visit Ultima," says Elinka. "Nor can you get here by following directions. It was a miracle you got here, but that is perfectly logical, because Ultima is a miracle in itself." The End
- phjesusthatguy3 9y ago
  Kibo of alt.religion.kibology posted a Christmas themed CYOA to the group decades ago, and the only winning ending was deliberately unreachable.
failrate 9y ago
Try using Twine. It makes creating CYOA browser games easy.

rmidthun 9y ago

CYOA still lives, but in different forms. Japanese Visual Novels are basically CYOA with pictures. The number of decision points varies depending on the book in question, but the basic structure is still there. Twine [1] is a system that allows you to create stories, essentially CYOA but with the option of adding variables. For instance, you could have an option that is only selectable if you found a key earlier. This bridges the gap between CYOA and classic text adventure. Since Twine outputs HTML it is also easy to port wherever you want. Finally, there are a number of online community CYOA. This being the Internet, the quality is varied and many of them are pornographic. Probably the biggest is Addventure[2] [1] http://twinery.org/ http://twinery.org/ [2] http://www.addventure.com/ http://www.addventure.com/

jamesmintram 9y ago

Fighting Fantasy... Just gonna leave this here: http://nomadgames.co.uk/fightingfantasy/ http://nomadgames.co.uk/fightingfantasy/ (Disclosure: I am one of the programmers)

allenu 9y ago

Choose Your Own Adventure and text-based adventure games you type into your computer (with BASIC) really got me into computers as a kid back in the late 80s/early 90s. I wrote my own gamebooks using a simple notepad and "turn to page XXX"-style narratives. In the end, they are just programs that you follow. :) To this day, I'm still fascinated by them and recently wrote some sites that let you create CYOA-style adventures yourself and with others; http://www.thiswayorthat.club http://www.thiswayorthat.club is one of them.

addled 9y ago

I had forgotten all about COYA books until recently, when I was at a yard sale and found Twist-a-Plot's "Calling Outer Space". I had never heard of it but instantly knew I had to have it as soon as I saw that crazy cover. I've had a blast reading this together with my 7 year old son.

ropable 9y ago

There was another CYOA series called Way of the Tiger by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson where you played a ninja. They were pretty unforgiving and graphic. My younger self enjoyed those enough that I was inspired to convert the first one into a web application a few years ago: https://ropable.com/avenger/ https://ropable.com/avenger/