Choose Your Own Animation

Posted: November 17th, 2009 | Author: Jason Scott | Filed under: Interactive Fiction | 2 Comments »

eaten-by-a-grue

A portion of the GET LAMP documentary discusses Choose Your Own Adventure books, also known as “game books” and a bunch of other names (not all were called “Choose Your Own Adventure” and there were thousands of them). While there’s no direct lineage between text adventures and CYOA (I checked this, there really isn’t), there’s that same sense of chopped-up narrative and the unique interesting aspects of the feeling of freedom of destiny that both of these products brought to the world. And there is a little overlap here and there; for example, Steve Meretzky created a number of gamebook based on the Zork world at one point.

Recently, after over a year of work, Christian Swinehart released an online exhibit allowing you to experience these books interactively, graphically, and via animations. It is, frankly, amazing.

The exhibit has an explanation at this page, but I would suggest going right to one of the gallery pages and just experiencing it. It’s that amazing. Amazing work, Christian.

2 Comments on “Choose Your Own Animation”

  1. 1 RossH said at 11:20 am on November 18th, 2009:

    I never really got into the “choose your own adventure” style books as I found the constant pageflipping you needed to do rather annoying. But ever since the advent of eBook readers, I thought they would be the perfect medium for such books as you could use hyperlinks.

    Well looks as though the CYOA books have all been converted to the Kindle. Could this signal a resurgance in IF?

    http://www.cyoa.com/public/index.html

  2. 2 Choose your own digital adventure | Wordbits said at 8:42 am on November 23rd, 2009:

    [...] (Hat tip to Jason Scott) [...]

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