If you were a kid during the '80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us in a way that normal books did not. At key plot points, the reader got to make decisions that actually changed the course of the story....
...That doesn't mean that the era of the Choose Your Own Adventure has ended, even if it is some 30 years (egad) after the original series began. One recent example of updated Choose Your Own Adventure-type books is the "What if" series, which began in 2006. They're dubbed "Choose Your Destiny" novels by Random House and written by Liz Ruckdeschel and Sara James. "She's all yours," promises the book cover, of the character, Haley Miller, who starts off in book 1 at 15, the new girl at a New Jersey public high school, where the reader must help her forge her way. By book 8 in the series, it's "Time to send Haley off into the world. Are you ready?"...
...The same elements that drew us to CYOA books in the '80s and '90s are at work again here: The ability to live vicariously though a character (an aspect of any novel) is even more actionable than in other fiction because we actually get to make decisions for the characters—assuming the author has written those options in, of course. These decisions have repercussions, often major ones: Some point to a "fixation on death" that appears to run through the original series. There are obviously stakes here—decisions are made; consequences are had.
CYOA-esque books like the What if series and Clark's upcoming books bring us some new female-oriented plot lines about school and dating and social lives (as if informed by, say, Gossip Girl), that the old CYOA books, typically focused on adventure, fantasy, or horror—anything, really, but romance!—didn't offer. But the aspect of making a choice for your character, and seeing it through, is the same. "Whatever you decide, your night changes," says Mercado of Most Likely To. "There’s a really annoying guy in a band who wants to just tell you about his music, do you put up with him or do you see through it and go? You saw someone maybe slip a pill in someone’s drink, do you convince yourself you didn’t see it, or do you address it and be willing to take the fallout?"...
...Packard is now working on an adult novel and told the Wire he's not interested in writing more interactive books in the CYOA-genre. Over the past few years, however, he's revised, expanded, and adapted three of his orignal CYOA books for release as U-Ventures apps at the iTunes store. "Of course there's a lot you can do in this format that you can't do in a printed book," he says. "There is no limit to the number of pages, so in a scene where you are swimming, trying to get to shore, you can keep swiping pages and you only encounter more scenes of the sea. Your frustration and uncertainty mimic what you'd feel in reality. In one scene you have to make a repair on our spaceship and the computer says there will be a catastrophic failure in 20 seconds. The reader has to solve the problem in real time: The countdown of time remaining is shown on the screen. We have light and sound effects. The computer remembers where you've been, which can affect what you know and what happens when you reach a certain locale and if and when you come back to it." (Simon & Schuster have been releasing print versions of the apps since March.) ...
