The first decade of my life happened squarely in the 1980's. This was the heyday of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. CYOA offers not one but multiple endings, reached by a series of choices the reader makes on how the story will progress. Each time a choice is made, a reader is directed to flip to a new, often nonadjacent, page to continue the story.
Christian Swinehart, a computational and graphic designer with a Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, has performed an intelligent exploration of the genre and its relationship to gaming. He also connects the genre's form to how data was organized and entered into computers in the age of analog computing.
The expose is illustrated with beautifully designed maps that represent visualizations of how the books were structured and the decision paths present within them. The site also contains some animations of the decision paths in different books.
This project represents not only a beautiful ode to a peculiar genre of children's literature but also an excellent example of how graphic and narrative should be used to create and relate knowledge.
As a bonus, there's even a CYOA book, Zork: The Cavern of Doom, that you can try out.
Image property of Christian Swinehart.
1 comments:
Hmmm . . .links directly to the CYOA pages are broken from my blog. If you're interested, you can still access the page through Swinehart's blog. Click on the link at the bottom of the post.
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