@6: Obviously not, I’m reminiscing about Choose Your Own Adventure on Boing Boing at 1:30 in the morning.

Those were “Be an Interplanetary Spy!” which were pretty awesome.

ah! “university”

“I never, ever got a good ending in a CYOA book. I always died, no matter what I tried to do.”

little did you realize the valuable lesson in life you were getting there…

I like Cortazar’s Hopscotch where the narrative would be designed so sometimes you would read the exact same chapter in two different routes, but the meaning to the reader would be completely different depending on what route of chapters you took before you read that specific chapter.

There’s also a cool Borges short story where he writes of a story with nine different beginnings, that slowly combine three different middles, and the same ending.

My brother wrote me a cruel choose your own adventure when I was a kid for a birthday present, every single ending was a horrible, painful death.

I started collecting CYOA books again a few years ago, and have a majority of all the ones published. My favorite is #49 ‘Danger at Anchor Mine’ (Louise Munro Foley is my favorite CYOA writer). It has a consistent story line, which for me is what makes a good CYOA. I also like those with a clear objective, like take a picture of a yeti in ‘The Abominable Snowman’ #13.

I hand write these maps and save them in the front of all the books. I’ve even mapped one using GraphViz before, but I think I’ll have to take a look at my maps and see if I can’t whip up a few digital versions of my favorites.

I must add that my assignment, and the whole idea of mapping a CYOA book was adopted from a very similar idea by Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland, College Park. I imagine that most of the CYOA maps you’ll find online were inspired by Matt’s original assignment.

I have a job. It’s middle school information literacy teacher, and this kind of thing is IMMENSELY useful in helping kids understand the new hyper/web rhetorical forms which their society makes possible.

Thanks, all, for this and for the others. I’ve been mapping CYA books by hand on the whiteboard for years; nice to know I can hand these out instead!

Then I decided the whole thing was pointless and went back to drawing mazes. I liked mazes.

[spoiler? I guess? Below?]
Packard did another one called “Inside UFO 54-40″, and all through the book people are talking about a perfect planet called “Utopia” which you can’t get to by making a choice or following a direction (the only way to navigate the books); it turns out there’s a four or five page spread in the middle of the book where you make it to Utopia and end up with the best possible ending, but there is no way to get to those pages. It just sits there in the middle of the book, unreachable if you follow the rules.

That exploded my head when I was eight

I was crazy about CYOAs as a kid. I must have had at least 30 of them, not including all the copycats and spinoffs like the Time Machine books. In a fit of selflessness I gave them all away to a kid I used to babysit for when I left for college.

Strange sort of Twilight Zone moment: my favorite one was The Mystery of the Secret Room, of which you actually see the cover barely altered as the Harry Potter on in the Something Awful gallery. I used that book as a template for lucid dreaming exercises when I was 11. (I was prodigious and had a subscription to OMNI, OK?) I had this odd crush on the future girl in the book, whose name I still recall but which I won’t embarass myself by reciting here. On my MySpace profile under “Who I’d Like To Meet” I wrote, “The girl with the half green half purple hair from [this book], but real, and adult.” About a year ago I was in my old comic shop in NYC when I see a twenty-something girl who is a dead ringer for her (at least her funky hair) and appropos wardrobe. I run into her a couple more times in the next few days. A friend knows her and points her out on MySpace, so I make contact. Never got a reply. Perhaps that’s for the best.

I don’t know that one… anyone have a title? I’d love to read it.

http://www.graphviz.org

which compiles and lays out graphs from simple text files which define the node and edge relationships. The text and titles were added in Photoshop.

-Sean