Choose Your Own Adventure Analysis

The original Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) gamebooks were published between 1979 and 1998. The genre remains popular enough that variations are still being published, although many hardcore fans only recognize the first fifty or so books in the series as “true” CYOA.

Gamebooks are print precursors to branching paths narratives that we find in videogames, interactive fiction, and elsewhere.

What can texts like this tell us about interactivity? About storytelling? About narrative structure? And what do these texts have to teach us about literature in the digital world?

This project asks you to undertake these questions as you examine an interactive text.

Choosing a text

A CYOA text

A video game like Detroit Become Human where the gameplay hinges on player choices and multiple outcomes are possible.

An app/game like Lifeline, Device 6, 80 Days, or Kentucky Route Zero

An interactive text of your choosing that we discuss

Read/Play
You will need to read or play through the text several times, exploring the multiple paths

Map the text
This will take much longer than simply reading the book. Exactly how you map your book is up to you. You might try using Graphviz (or browser-based versions like WebGraphviz or Graphviz Online). You can also try the free concept mapping tool CmapTools. There are tons of mapping tools. You can hand draw something, use photographs or other digital tools. Whatever method you choose, you must map the structure of the book in an intuitive way that makes the connections and paths in the book fully visible. Color coding, different shapes, and other iconography can help the legibility of your map. Provide a legend or a key that helps decipher your map.

Next, analyze your book and its map. Consider what your map reveals about the CYOA book that a casual reading might overlook. Some questions you might want to address include, but are not limited to, the following: What surprised you about the map? Are some paths more significant than others? Are there major and minor paths, and if so, what’s the difference between them? Is there anything about the longest path on your map that distinguishes it from other paths, aside from its length? Is it “privileged” in any way, in the kinds of decisions the reader faces? Can the kind of decisions presented to the reader be categorized? Is there any correlation between the length of the path and the kinds of decisions the reader makes? Is there any logic to the narrative interruptions and when and where they occur?

Think about the way you mapped your book; what deliberate mapping decisions did you have to make, and why did you choose to include certain information in your legend and exclude other information?

Here are other questions to consider as you analyze your CYOA book:

• Who is the presumed “you” of the story? How much does your similarity or distance to that presumed you influence your choices (on the micro level) and your overall engagement (on the macro level) with the story?
• What is the pace or rhythm of choices? Are there stretches with no decisions? What accounts for those?
• Aside from our interest in the narrative structure of CYOA books, we can also critique the narratives from an ideological perspective. What cultural values does the story promote? What people, places, objects, and beliefs does the story devalue? What issues does the story gloss over or ignore? And, how much does mapping the narrative contribute toward understanding the CYOA book from an ideological perspective?

Be sure to build on Sam Kabo Ashwell’s “Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games”. Does your map resemble any of the structures he proposes? Does it challenge any of his ideas? What else can you say about the narrative structure of your book in relationship to his ideas?

Your analysis should be 5–7 pages, include proper in-text citation of your sources and a properly formatted Works Cited.

A note on sources: cite your primary text, and Ashwell. You may also want to include commentary or critique from other sources in your analysis.

Map, Key, and Analysis due April 9th.