CULTUREBOX

Choose Your Own Adventure

How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive
entertainment.
By GRADY HENDRIX
FEB 17, 20117:40 PM

Between 1978 and 1982, entertainment went interactive, and, for myself and
many others, Choose Your Own Adventurebooks were the catalyst. Unlike
Dungeons & Dragons, which required friends; or computer games, which
required your parents to spend a lot of money; or arcade games, which required
your sister to drive you to the mall, Choose Your Own Adventure books cost
$1.75, and you could read them on your own.

The idea for interactive fiction was laid out by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941 in his
short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”: A Chinese spy for Germany living in
Great Britain discusses his ancestor’s ambition to write a vastly complex novel
that is also a labyrinth wherein every branching path is determined by the
reader’s choices. A more prosaic early attempt at interactive texts were
psychologist B.F. Skinner’s “programmed learning” books that culminated with
Doubleday’s interactive TutorText series, which debuted in 1958 with the
thrilling The Arithmetic of Computers. Basically an extended multiple-choice
quiz, a correct answer sent you forward in the text while an incorrect answer
sent you to a page explaining just how wrong you were. But all of these efforts
were eclipsed by the bedtime story Edward Packard told his two daughters in
1969.

While telling his daughters their story, Packard, then a lawyer who was “never
comfortable with the law,” asked them what happened next. They each gave a
different answer and he turned this branching path story into what would one
day become the Choose Your Own Adventure book Sugarcane Island. “I had
written a couple of children’s stories that I hadn’t been able to sell,” he says,
“And I couldn’t sell this one either. It went in the desk drawer.”

In 1976, he saw an ad for Vermont Crossroads Press, a small publishing house

run by Raymond Montgomery and his wife, Constance Cappel, that was looking
for innovative children’s books. Packard sent them Sugarcane Island.
Montgomery was a big advocate of experiential learning and he had been
designing role-playing exercises for Abt Associates, a consulting company that
applied social sciences to government and military problems. Recognizing the
value of Packard’s idea, he bought the book and announced a line of interactive
stories for children called “The Adventures of You.”

What happened next involves a complicated series of shuffles that essentially

saw Packard leave VCP, followed by Montgomery signing a six book contract
with Bantam. The publishing house retitled the books “Choose Your Own
Adventure” and Packard returned to help write them. In 1980, Bantam signed
Packard and Montgomery to separate deals that allowed them each to write
Choose Your Own Adventure books.

From the start, the books were full of innovative page hacks. Readers would be
trapped in the occasional time loop, forced to flip back and forth between two
pages. Most memorable was Inside UFO 54-40,a book in which the most
desired outcome, discovering the Planet Ultima, could only be achieved by
readers who cheated and flipped through the book until they reached the page
on their own. At that point, the book congratulated the reader for breaking the
rules.

Many Choose Your Own Adventure fans at the time noted how fixated the
books were on death. “One of the running jokes,” says Christian Swinehart, a
graphic designer who has spent a lot of time studying the structure of the series,
“is that every choice leads to death, more or less.”   Packard and Montgomery
were determined to make the books feel “real.” Whereas most children’s
literature comes out of an educational tradition, which requires “good” choices
to result in victory and “bad” choices to result in death, they wanted to keep the
reader guessing. “My intent was to try to make it like life as much as possible,”
Packard says. “I didn’t want it to be a random lottery but I didn’t want it to be
didactic so that if you always did the smart thing you always succeeded. I tried
to balance it.”

“There’s no way we could have programmed a moral ending for every story
line,” Montgomery concurs. “Life isn’t that way. Choose Your Own Adventure is
not that way. Choose Your Own Adventure is a simulation that approximates
the choices that we face in our lives.” Over time, the series evolved from
straight adventure stories like The Cave of Time, Your Code Name is
Jonah, and Who Killed Harlow Thrombey? to more immersive books that took
full advantage of the second-person narrator like You Are a Shark, You Are a
Genius!, You Are a Monster and the downright existential, Who Are You? There
were sports books ( Stock Car Champion, Skateboard Champion, Roller Star)
and even 11 martial arts books (Master of Tae Kwon Do, Master of
Karate, Master of Judo).

Montgomery and Packard were the most prolific authors of the series, with
Packard held in especially high regard by serious fans. “Packard was more of
the writer,” Demian Katz, the archivist behind a massive online gamebooks
catalog, says. “I’m not a fan of the inconsistent books. I like exploring the world,
but having the world stay the same despite my choices.” A book like
Packard’s The Mystery of Chimney Rock is narratively simple: You choose to
investigate, or not, a spooky house, inhabited by an old lady, a cat, and a
groundskeeper. Packard takes these simple elements and weaves a near-
infinite series of choices from them like a jazz musician expanding a riff. “36
possible endings,” the cover proclaims, and every one of them appears logical.

Montgomery, on the other hand, often eschewed internal consistency in favor of

big ideas, and his books have their own bizarre charm. While Packard was
writing the standard sword-and-sorcery story The Forbidden Castle about
dragons, knights, and princesses, Montgomery unleashed the berserk House of
Dangerwhich involved super-intelligent monkeys plotting to destabilize the world
economy via counterfeiting, psychic detectives, Civil War ghosts, alien
abduction, holograms, age regression, cannibalism, secret environmental
conspiracies, and one ending that has the reader turned into Genghis Khan.

The books were a hit and, with more than 250 million copies in print, it felt as if
everyone read them at some point. In a world before Nintendo DS, where the
only games you could play on your own were Merlin or Simon Says, a book
like The Cave of Time was a comparatively sophisticated portable
entertainment system. And, even better, adults were suckers for kids reading
books.

For Montgomery and Packard, the market appeared to be insatiable; it was

inevitable that the two occasionally worked on automatic pilot. “I wrote several
sports books, about which I knew very little,” Packard says. “I wrote a book
called Soccer Star, even though I’d never played soccer, and I’d never watched
a full game. I read a book on coaching soccer and it seemed to work. That book
became a very good seller in Germany.”

Both men wrote separately, often completely ignorant of the titles the other was
producing, trusting that Bantam would coordinate the line. But they were
committed to Choose Your Own Adventure and in total agreement about the
series’ voice: the second-person you. After all, the series was called
“Choose Your Own Adventure” not “Choose a Fictional Character’s Adventure.”
Using the second person also had another key benefit: “From the outset, we
wanted Choose Your Own Adventure books to be non-gender specific,”
Montgomery says. “It was a conscious decision.”

It’s also a counterintuitive one, making the books resemble games far more
than books. David Lebling, one of the fathers of computer gaming and one of
the programmers behind the pioneering text-adventure series, Zork, says,
“When you think about the way books work, for the most part the protagonist is
a well-defined person and the book is about that well-defined person and it
makes sense to say this is a man or a woman. The details are critical to the
story. Second-person books, in my experience, have not been all that
successful. Second-person games have been pretty successful.”

The no-gender policy proved difficult to maintain when Bantam hired artists to
draw covers and illustrations for the series. “In the text I was always extremely
rigorous never to have anyone refer to the reader as ‘he.’ ” Packard says. “But
Bantam insisted it be a boy because they had market research that said girls
would identify with boys but boys would never read a book where ‘you’ was a
girl. That was a big problem because most of the covers were of boys and most
of the illustrations were of boys.”

It was a move that Packard believes lost readers: “I think we lost a huge
number of girls to The Babysitter’s Club.” Two other problems led to the decline
of the series. One was competition from dozens of other Choose Your Own
Adventure style series: TSR’s Endless Quest, Britain’s Fighting Fantasy,
Infocom’s spin-off Zork books, R.L. Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps, the
Which Waybooks, Twistaplot, Lone Wolf, Lazer Tag Adventures, and hundreds
more.

“A lot of the competing series were published by our own publisher, Bantam!”
Montgomery recalls. “They knew a good thing when they saw it, I guess. I don’t
remember any particular response to it. We were competing with ourselves at
that point.” The second reason the series ended was built into the structure of
the books themselves: the tension between narrative and interactivity. It’s the
same tension that was found in the emerging genre of computer games.

David Lebling says, “When you think about narrative and interaction you’re
thinking about the degree of control the player has over the story. You can
make sandbox games where you wander around and do things. There’s no way
you can really die and there are many paths exploring your sandbox, but if you
want to get something closer to a traditional narrative you can’t do that. You
have to push, entice, or otherwise drag the player along through your narrative.”

Choose Your Own Adventure created a demand for interactivity among its
readers, but the series itself was becoming less interactive as time went on. “In
the early days of CYOA, we—when I say we, I mean myself and the other
writers—had quite a few more endings than later on in the series,” Montgomery
says. “We had as many as 30 to 40 endings in the first 10 to 15 titles. We were
burning up story lines like crazy with all of those different endings. And it was
fun, but even if it only took six, seven pages to get to an ending, there wasn’t a
lot of room for character development, or plot development, or all the kinds of
descriptive phrases that you need to build a scene.”

It was a simple matter of page count, imposed by the physical restrictions of

book publishing: A 118-page story can only let you deviate from the main
narrative so far. “A Choose Your Own Adventure is almost the epitome of not
giving you choices,” says Lebling. “They’re—what? One hundred fifty pages,
max? So each page or every other page usually gives you two or three choices,
and if you multiply that out that’s not an enormous number of possible states.”
Christian Swinehart has charted how the number of endings declined as the
series progressed, a sure sign that narrative was taking precedence over
interactivity. But interactivity wasn’t vanishing, it was evolving and books were
no longer the optimal medium with which to deliver it.
“Gamebooks were getting more complex,” Swinehart says, referring to series
like Fighting Fantasy, which used dice rolls and had combat systems. “Suddenly
you needed to have a pencil and paper and do math to move along, and at that
point what a computer is there for is to keep track of a set of numbers and
crunch them for you.”

When Lebling encountered the Choose Your Own Adventure series, he had
already written and programmed Zork. “I saw the Choose Your Own Adventure
books as being a knock-off,” he says. “I saw them after Infocom started up and
thought, ‘Oh, this is trying to do an adventure game as a book. How strange.’ I
thought of them as being less interactive and less open than even the smallest
adventure games.”

The end of the series was hardly a surprise for Packard. “I knew that, like all
series, they get very popular, sales shoot up and then trail off,” he says. “I could
see the peak being reached and then things going off.”

At least in America.

“Researching interactive books,” Demian Katz, gamebooks archivist, says,

“There’s pretty much the same pattern in every country. A few come out, they
become explosively popular, a flood of knock-offs are released, they reach
critical mass and then drop off into nothing. When I first started cataloguing
them, around 1998, it was happening in the Czech Republic. That was one of
the last booms.”

Coincidentally, Choose Your Own Adventure books ceased publication in 1998.

Packard and Montgomery had a falling out and no are no longer on speaking
terms, but each continues to fly the interactive-fiction flag. In 2000, they
regained the copyright for their respective titles. Packard took his to Simon &
Schuster where he’s developing them into full-blown apps under the name U-
Ventures, while Montgomery picked up the rights to use the Choose Your Own
Adventure name, and he and several of his authors have started ChooseCo, a
company that’s reprinting the old books and publishing new ones.

For Montgomery, the choice is to keep publishing the books, aiming at young
readers who will still be enticed by the novelty of interactive fiction. “I think that
the later books with fewer endings actually helped kids make the transition from
Choose Your Own Adventure books to regular, full-length books with third
person narratives and no choices,” he says. Packard’s U-Ventures are e-books
with features that make them more like games, with codes that need to be
entered and timed challenges. “We want to take advantage of the format and do
things you couldn’t do in the printed books,” he says.

But the books will never again achieve the massive impact they once had.
“These books were the gateway drugs of interactive entertainment,” says
Swinehart. “The Infocom people and the Choose Your Own Adventure people
are hybrid folks. You don’t often see people combining the hacker perspective
with the literary perspective. You don’t see typing and programming mix
together that much.” David Lebling agrees, “Computers push graphics, books
push reading, but there was a brief shining moment when computers pushed
reading.” And, inversely, during that same time, the Choose Your Own
Adventure books pushed programming.

“The most important thing is to get people reading,” Montgomery says. “It’s not
the format. It’s not even the writing. It’s the reading. And the reading happened
because kids were put in the driver’s seat. They were the mountain climber,
they were the doctor, they were the deep sea explorer. They made choices, and
so they read.” The Choose Your Own Adventure books were part of a cultural
shift that saw entertainment become more interactive. It was a moment when
entertainment became, in a way, more like real life. As the introduction to each
of the books states:       

“Remember—you cannot go back! Think carefully before you make a move!

One mistake can be your last … or it may lead to fame and fortune.

“Good luck!”

Fuente:

https://slate.com/culture/2011/02/choose-your-own-adventure-books-how-the-
cave-of-time-taught-us-to-love-interactive-entertainment.html