Good examples of print IF?

[pelle]

@David Whyld

I always liked the fact that CYOA could go completely off on a tangent, taking you out of your comfort zone and dumping you in a totally unexpected situation. You sometimes had no idea what was going to happen due to the choices you made which was part of the appeal for me. I used to read and re-read all the CYOA gamebooks to see what was different along each path; with gamebooks that are more ‘on the rails’ there’s no real incentive to go back and re-read them once you’re done because the alternative paths are essentially the same as the one you just read.

I think a gamebook can have too much or too little branching. Fire On The Water I remember as a gamebook that was too much on rails (see graph). That is a structure that seems too common in digital choice-based games. Branching out too much of course means logarithmically less story to go into any branch, so you end up with a very short or thick book, which is also not ideal.

The big problem with the CYOA for kids books I have read is the complete lack of “world model”. As an example (spoiler warning, heh) in one book you go look for your missing dog in a house. Depending on completely arbitrary choices the book can end with finding the dog in several different places of the house, or finding out that it was at home all the time, or that it was outside of the house, or that it was all just a dream. I just don’t see the point in exploring different options when the story is so incoherent. It would be much, much more interesting to be able to try different, meaningful, choices and see what their effects were. Don’t know if the CYOA for older readers are better.

[David_Whyld1 (David Whyld)]

Do you think the target audience, i.e. kids, really give two hoots about the lack of a “world model”?

[pelle]

@David Whyld

Do you think the target audience, i.e. kids, really give two hoots about the lack of a “world model”?

As a parent I do get to decide (more or less) what books my kids read. The CYOA series for kids has a fantastic opportunity to teach something about cause-and-effect, to subtly show them how choices matter (in a fun way). They fail miserably. It’s not that they have to be full of boring moral lessons, but they could at least make some sense and let the kids experiment with what choices mean instead of just throwing random silly things back at them.

Your argument could be applied to non-interactive children’s books as well. Kids just don’t care. You can read almost anything to them and they love it. That doesn’t mean it is not interesting to analyze their books to see what we should expose them to. In the case of CYOA it also happens that the writing and stories overall are just plain bad and not really comparable to the worst normal children’s books we normally read.

It is also the fact that especially English books (English not being our first language) my kids will not read on their own for at least a few more years, so any gamebooks they are likely to consume will have to also be tolerable to their parents. Books for small children do not only have to be enjoyed by them, but also by the one reading the book to them. Good children’s book authors have figured that out a long time ago. CYOA authors have most definitely not.

Would be interesting to see some really good children’s gamebooks. Would definitely buy. It is a lot more fun to read books with choices with the kids than to just read linear books, especially since you tend to have to read the same book over and over and over again anyway.

[SimonChris (Simon Christiansen)]

@David Whyld

Do you think the target audience, i.e. kids, really give two hoots about the lack of a “world model”?

Even as a kid, I hated the way CYOA books would change the backstory depending on your choices, completely ruining the illusion that you were actually solving a case, or whatever. So, if you go left, the murderer is the butler, but if you go right, it was the driver all along! Choices should affect the outcome of the story, not the backstory.

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

@SimonChris

@David Whyld

Do you think the target audience, i.e. kids, really give two hoots about the lack of a “world model”?

Even as a kid, I hated the way CYOA books would change the backstory depending on your choices, completely ruining the illusion that you were actually solving a case, or whatever. So, if you go left, the murderer is the butler, but if you go right, it was the driver all along! Choices should affect the outcome of the story, not the backstory.

I generally thought this way too, but different audience members seemed to have different tastes. Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? was my favorite CYOA because it did keep a consistent backstory, and that made it seem more like my choices mattered.* But one CYOA reviewer I was reading disliked it because it takes away from its re-readability once you know whodunit.

*I especially liked one bit where you had a choice of who to interrogate and they all ultimately led to the same page – but you got different information. It made me feel like my choice mattered even though it didn’t make a different branch, because the text I got from the choice was important. You couldn’t just bloop to the bottom of the page for the next choice.

[David_Whyld1 (David Whyld)]

Yep, different people have different tastes. The whole consistent world model is, to me, not half as important as telling a good story. If I can pick different choices and have the story take me in a different direction, whether or not it’s consistent, I’ll choose that any day over the more on-the-rails approach. For what it’s worth, I’m not reading these books for educational value, but entertainment value. Realism be damned.