Choose Your Own Adventure – Watch the Stories Unfold

Interaction designer Christian Swinehart takes a careful look at the popular Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980s. We saw something like this before, but Swinehart takes it a step further.

For those unfamiliar, these CYOA books let you make the protagonists’ main decisions, and your choices would have an impact on the outcome of the adventure. Some endings were bad and some were good.

With this in mind, Swineheart begins by color-coding pages. Either it’s a decision page or one of five possible types of endings: great (you win), favorable, mediocre, disappointing, and catastrophic. The analysis goes from there.

creeping-linearity

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Check out Swinehart’s report for the full analysis.

[Thanks James & Peter & Jodi]

UPDATE: I missed out on the best part. Check out the animated versions and watch the stories unfold. Sexy. [Thanks, gregvb]

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