Editorial: Choose Your Own Adventure

#publishing #ebooks #cyoa

This from Wired:

The Choosatron, [is] a digital storytelling platform in a cardboard box, which fuses arcade gaming with interactive fiction...As the Choosatron prints a tale, players select options via a keypad. "There's no flicking between pages; you create your own path."


So this is the future of the beloved Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story? Hmm. I thought it might be more...ebooky?

The Choosatron is a fun little gadget made for a novelty market, but  the CYOA format has a long history. I remember them from when I was young - the most thumbed books in the library, and my sisters had a few, which, as soon I worked out how to read, I was using as my own personal analogue Nintendo. The stories were told in the D&D friendly 2nd Person, insisting that 'you' were going down a hallway, 'you' were flying a rocket, and 'you' were facing certain death. It's an immediate form of writing, and something that a six-year-old me couldn't help but be engrossed in.

I also think it helped me to become a writer. I learnt how a story can evolve and adapt, twist and turn, and the decisions I made in those books reflect the writing process for me now.

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/numberstumper/

There are up-to-date versions of the CYOA books of course. The original brand relaunched a few years ago, and the format has never really gone away. It's been adapted to romance genres, zombie books and even Doctor Who.

Isn't it time these were resurrected for the digital savvy yooves of today? An app requires no paper-thumbing and can link to other transmedia projects. With updates, you could keep the various storylines going for ages, never quite getting to the slightly deflating you-have-met-your-end death page.

Publishers take note, and give me a bell if you want me to work on it with you!

D ;-/