The choose-your-own-adventure book I snagged was Edward Packard’s The Forbidden Castle, published in 1982. The story opens up with the text saying “You promised yourself never to go back into the Cave of Time! But when you found the opening behind a big boulder in Red Creek Canyon, you couldn’t resist” (1). This implies this isn’t the first time you’ve either been to the Cave of Time or gone back in time. You then slip and fall, hit your head and wake up in a field. You hide behind a tree as two knights ride up on horseback, then discuss amongst themselves the riddle of the Forbidden Castle. They say everyone has tried to solve it, and King Henry has offered a reward of half of Wales to anyone who solves it. There is an old monk who is promising King Henry dominion over all of Europe is he conquers the castle. The knights conclude with saying King Henry is suspicious of all travelers, especially odd-looking ones, because there’s been a recent discovery of spies in the court. From here you have to make the “right” choices to solve the riddle and find the castle, while avoiding knights and aggressors, WHILE keeping in mind you have to get back to your own time.

 

 

I originally just began to map out the story alternatives and possibilities in a tree format, taking advantage of the space, until I realized there were so many complex little detours and dead ends that I had to drastically alter my map to include JUST the choices. The obligatory “once you choose this, follow it over these pages” added extraneous paths, and also took the definitive measure of the storyline away. For a choose your own adventure, the end result is the main highlight, not so much the path you take. If it was about the path, we wouldn’t feel compelled to choose the “right” one. That may sound contradictory considering the entire focus of the genre is that you choose your own ending and interact among the different possibilities, but your interaction is limited only among the two, or at max three, choices they present you with. I tried to show the limited amount of choices and the various endings you are presented with in my graph to enforce the end, not the path to get there.

 

As far as Ryan’s strategic forms of interactivity, the tree diagram she ascribes to choose your own adventure novels seems like a good foundation, however due to space constraints and the ability of the story to connect to the same endings, her model can only be used as a starting point to map out possible connections. Her stipulation that the tree models “do not allow returns to a previous point” is possibly the main deciding factor. Even if one is continuing on in a different direction with a different story, two stories can still eventually wind up on the same ending. And even choosing between two paths for the story to take connects back in my book, as seen through the wavy lines connecting separate branches.  Her Flowchart model seems to offer the most leeway while keeping storylines separate, yet still allowing them to connect. The focus is on the ability to both keep storylines as separate entities developed by choices, while giving them the ability to connect back upon themselves.

 

This CYOA book details an external and ontological type of interactivity. The external describes a relationship in which the reader controls the pre-determined output but is not physically involved in it (ex: Second Life). The ontological describes the ability of choices to send the story into separate paths while keeping a general knowledge of the overall theme (solving a riddle and finding a castle).