For over eight hundred years the mystery of the collapsed Mayan civilization has haunted scientists, philosophers and people of the world. In this fiction childrens book about the disappearance of the Mayans, the reader chooses the path of a journalist in his quest to solve the unknown truth while visiting the ruins of the fallen cities. As stated in "Avatars of Story", this book follows internal interactivity, where the readers themselves are meant to act as the main character and choose the path of the character based on what the person would personally choose to do in a similar situation.
After forming a tree of the many intertwined possibilities for the outcome of this story, the paper had noticeably more action and more paths one one side. This means that within the first few pages of the book, when given the first choice of paths, one of the paths leads to a much longer, in-depth story than if the other option was chosen. The action of making decisions to send the history of the story on different forking paths to determine the outcome is quoted in "Avatars of a Story" as ontological interactivity. Ontological interactivity explains how so many different endings, none having to do whatsoever with the other, can all connect to the original theme of the story. For example, the first ending that I came across while reading this book concluded that the Mayans had left earth on a UFO because the world had become too dangerous to live in. After the journalist learned this, he watched as the same UFO hovered above a pyramid offering to take people to the planed Merganatic. The Story ended suddenly after reading what must have been only ten pages when the journalist decided that he too would join the people of Merganoatic by boarding the spacecraft. In another ending the journalist decided not to board the spacecraft but had his memory wiped away by an alien memory erasing stick and was left standing on the Mayan ruins with no memory of how he arrived there. There are countless other endings involving the journalist being sacrificed by the Mayans, or the journalist being successful and completing his story that he had come for. The idea of choosing your own adventure gives children who read this book endless opportunities for excitement, or sometimes disappointment. The chart that I have made to represent this story follows Avatars idea of a "tree" where each new path branches out from the previous path. However, it could be argued that the chart is also what Avatars called a "maze", where there is no specific pattern, seeing as many of my endings required the reader to loop around and start all the way from the beginning again. Overall, reading this book was an interesting adventure, even when I had to start all over again!