Intriguing visualizations of the possibilities and paths from various classic Choose Your Own Adventure books. Now, someone do Fighting Fantasy! [Samizdat]
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I gotta say, I cheated relentlessly at Choose Your Own Adventure books. Even if I won, I'd go back and choose other options just to find out about the various endings. The notion that I might not have read every page was maddening to me.
Fighting Fantasy books were even worse. My favourite (of the two of three I had) was the one where you commanded an army. I always did terribly at it, and had to resort to fudged dice rolls to get through to the end, eventually abandoning the dice altogether.
Naturally, RPGs waited in my future.
These mini posts really need to have headings listed on the main page. Even if they're small headings (the size of the headings after the posts shrink?).
I think it's interesting that, as the series progressed, there were fewer choices. I was always disappointed when it was "library day" at my school, because we were only allowed to check out 1 CYOA book per MONTH. Our teachers looked at them not as books, but as games. My mom (a reading teacher) HATED them and lumped them into the same category as The Babysitter's Club, in other words they were "trash books." I wonder if that was the case at other schools?
Christian Swinehart's visualizations on samizdat are only the most recent (though certainly the most ambitious) in a long line of Choose Your Own Adventure mapping projects. For more context, readers might be interested in the short history I've compiled of various visualizations of the CYOA books.
Itsumishi, why do they need headlines?