Choose Your Own Adventure: Greatest Achievement in the Genre December 28, 2009 at 7:30 pm
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike…
Remember these? Recently they have been reprinted. I saw a bunch in a bookstore two months ago.
I wrote this year’s annual Christmas letter in the format of a CYOA book (actually more like a printed copy of Colossal Cave). After reading it, my friend Doug (of the CPH Gaming Collective) pointed me towards a *great* article on the narrative structure of the CYOA books.
The conclusion of the article discusses one very interesting CYOA ending in a specific book – Inside UFO 54-40. The winning ending is unique in that it is disconnected from the narrative graph. There is no series of choices you can make to get to that ending. You can only “win” by “cheating”.
In the story, your concord flight is interrupted when you are beamed aboard a nearby spacecraft trolling the universe for intelligent life. Once aboard you discover your new captors, the U-TY, are interested in keeping you around only to the extent that you can help them find Ultima, the ‘planet of paradise’. The planet’s location is cloaked in mystery and you are only told that it’s a place that cannot be reached ‘by making a choice or following directions’. However this is all foreshadowing for when the reader finally becomes frustrated in the apparently impossible quest and begins flipping through the book hunting for that ending. In fact not choosing is the only way to reach Ultima.
This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.
This is a beautiful gem. By far the most interesting ending in any CYOA book, it is significant exactly because it recants the basis of the whole medium! Free will triumphs over destiny. And yet, at the same time, you are still choosing your own adventure. This is, in my opinion, the greatest achievement in the genre.
It’s unusual too – for one of the most fascinating example of an element of a medium to be so deliciously self-annihilating. I can’t really think of another case where it happens.
Got to get that book.
I’ve got the WHOLE collection! There are so many weird endings, such as in the first book, (The Cave of Time) you go back in time to a time where oxygen hasn’t even been developed yet, and you die that way! Weird ending, huh?
Ok john message me on roblox my username is macy12345.
lol my username is ferretleader, and I think I’m to old for that book…..
John email me with the price on roblox for the 500/500 orange goggles
Ferretleader,
John is a grown man, and he still checked this out. I’m fourteen, and I still like them. They add a hint of choice into a book, instead of having a set course.
Ahhh…I remember these books. They were the greatest.
I love these books. I completely forgot about them until this! Thank you John! My username is the same here as on roblox.
My son loves the CYOA books. I blogged about how funny it was that, at age 8, he was wondering why we weren’t reading every single page. But now that he’s caught one, he loves them. I did too, growing up!
I read one recently from a new company that was really pretty great. It’s about a zombie apocalypse, and although it’s funny and irreverent (and really long), you can tell that the author really loves the choose your own adventure genre. “Zombocalypse Now!” Check it out.
Ailens on Easter Island
But seriously, all you godamn unrelated dirty lizard-like children, this is about the book, not blowing up brick people. And no one saw how the ailens face looked like a vagina.
I would love to acquire a copy of this book
I need to get my grubby, book-craving little hands on one of those.