You've Been Eaten By a Grue: Choose Your Own Adventure Books and Hypertext

Many of us cut our literary teeth on Choose Your Own Adventure Books. Like hard copy hypertext, these books engendered a love of reading by allowing bright-eyed youngsters to make decisions for themselves as they read through the story. The choices that the reader made could either lead to victory against all odds, or utter defeat and violent fictional death.

As the 1980s wore on, however, the core idea behind these books was picked up by the new video and computer game industry. Begin with text-based adventures like Zork, technology allowed people to create increasingly more interactive environments which eventually far surpassed Choose Your Own Adventure Books in popularity. Today, the plot of video games is often just as important as the graphics and controls.

And now, designer Christian Swinehart has decided to use a little bit of today's technology to give back to this whimsical pioneering genre.  He's done an impressive study on these books, which he calls CYOA. Swinehart sampled twelve books, drawing conclusions on the general structure of the genre and using modern design tools to map out the plots of each book. His animations give a sense of the inner workings of the books themselves, and he even allows a complete walkthrough of Zork: The Cavern of Doom for those who are feeling particularly nostalgic.

Here's an example of what his work looks like:

You can read more about the project over at Brain Pickings, which is where I first heard about it. Maria Popova makes a particularly interesting point about the evolution of Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves.

Overall, this is a great example of everything old becoming new again. A genre that was overtaking by the wow-factor of interactive gaming now finds new life as an object of nostalgia and study. We are given new insights into old books thanks to contemporary technological tools. Reading through this study has been a joy: I can only hope Swinehart uses his design skills to tackle other literary projects in the future. A sensical plot map of The Sound and the Fury would be nice.