The website One Book, Many Readings is an analysis of trends in interactive, hypertextual fiction. These were the Choose Your Own Adventure books that began to flourish in the 80s. The design models for quests, side-quests and narrative are used in the game design of a number of adventure based and role-playing video games currently available. The demise of the books seems to coincide with the rise of many of these kinds of video games.
Visual map of a branching story
The analysis pointed out some interesting aspects of the evolution of the books over time. As the books were published, certain approaches seemed to work better than o
thers. These books become more popular, had more sales and helped to direct the next round of publications. It would seem that anyone who enjoyed a narrative that gave them choices would prefer a large range of choices and endings. Although that make sense intuitively, it seems that the opposite happened.
Rather than becoming more complex they began to decrease in branching and increase in linearity. The reason for the change isn’t really clear, perhaps an increased demand for simpler stories or may the genre starting to settle into an equilibrium. A place where it the ability to branch a story doesn’t affect the quality of the story itself. It still remains a solid narrative that resonates with the reader rather than giving them a complex, muddled experience.
The other interesting aspect of the research is the idea that some of the books rewarded the “creative interpretation of the rules”. In one story in particular, Inside UFO 54-40, you could actually get to a special ending by not following the constraints of the system but thinking outside of them. What makes this interesting is that the Choose Your Own Adventure books started to evolve to a place where creative thinking would allow the reader to experience them in a much different way. It is something I don’t see evolving in video game design, an affordance built into the game play that can take you to a completely different outcome if you decide to think outside the constraints of the system. Cheats and exploits aren’t really the same, the help a player gain an unfair advantage. Although they are creative, they aren’t built in as part of the narrative around the game itself.
