Let’s bring back Choose Your Own Adventure books
When I was growing up in the 1980s, Choose Your Own Adventure-style books (the generic term is gamebook) were extraordinarily popular. There was fierce competition for them at the local library, and every time I went to the mall with my parents, I marched them to Waldenbooks to check out the dedicated gamebook section, which took up several shelves.
For those of you who have never read a gamebook, they are stories in which the reader periodically decides the direction of the narrative by choosing between scripted options.
The book presents a choice every page or two, and each choice corresponds to a page number. You turn to that page and continue reading.
When written well, with interesting choices, gamebooks are tremendously fun to read, and you can read them multiple times to experience new storylines. Some of them also give you an objective — the “game” part of gamebook. They are stories you can win. Others have dozens of endings: happy, sad, and in-between.
Choose Your Own Adventure is the most famous brand of gamebook, but there are hundreds of others. Wikipedia lists a few, but check out gamebooks.org for the definitive catalog. Other series add depth to the game mechanics: stat sheets, inventories, health, luck, magic, combat and superpowers, to name a few. There’s an amazing variety.
The one thing they virtually all have in common, though, is that they are written in second person, putting the reader at the center of the story. My favorite series, Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf, allows you to evolve your character in a story arc encompassing 20 books, carrying items, skills and knowledge forward to subsequent stories. As an 8-year-old who had just learned to read, this series, and others like it, made for an intoxicating mixture of adventure, imagination and choice.
In the early-90s, however, the gamebook market began to ebb, and Choose Your Own Adventure went out of print in 1998. It reappeared several years later — mostly as reprints — but very few gamebooks are being published today.
The Internet is bringing gamebooks back, however, in a digital form. Over the last couple years, some books popular in the 80s have been re-imagined as mobile apps. A few series have appeared on Kickstarter, in digital and print formats (though prices tend to be steep). Joe Dever has famously made his books free of charge to read online. And at least one company is commissioning new stories for smartphones.
I’ve enjoyed many of these books in electronic form (check out Sorcery!, in particular). But what I’d really like to see is a rebirth of the mass market paperback format. I strongly believe it would be good for children learning to read, especially those who spend an inordinate amount of time staring at screens. Gamebooks could provide an alternative to TV and video games that is missing in today’s marketplace.
- They offer a new, exciting reading experience for children.
- They encourage children to make decisions and experience the outcome of those decisions, teaching the ramifications of choice.
- They can tell stories that aren’t win or lose. Video games usually require you to advance the story or die trying. Gamebooks, however, can provide multiple endings that are neither good nor bad, they are simply wildly different. Just like life.
How can gamebooks make a comeback?
To make a comeback, I think the format needs a truly exceptional writer. Someone who embraces the interactive narrative model to craft a deep, character-driven plot that invests the reader in the story. In short, the format need a C.S. Lewis, a J.K. Rowling, or a Judy Blume.
The sad truth is that gamebooks have never been particularly well written. Most of series from the 1980s were aimed squarely at the Dungeons & Dragons set and were churned out in the hundreds by commissioned authors. Perhaps this is gamebooks’ fatal flaw — it’s just too tempting to veer into fantasy adventure and choose plot over character. But fantasy has a rich history in children’s literature — look at Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland and the Chronicles of Narnia, for example. So, I have hope.
In the mean time, I’d settle for publishers experimenting with new series, new authors and new stories written for today’s young adult audience, not just reprints of stories from the past. A love of reading is a lifelong gift for a child, and gamebooks introduced many of my generation to that gift. I’m confident they would have a similar impact on this generation as well. Minecraft is an incredible sandbox and Candy Crush is a lot of fun, but there is no substitute for a good book when you’re 8-years-old. Especially with you as the hero.
