Gamebooks

A gamebook is a work of printed fiction that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices. The narrative branches along various paths, typically through the use of numbered paragraphs or pages. Gamebooks are sometimes called choose your own adventure books or CYOA after the influential Choose Your Own Adventure series originally published by US company Bantam Books. Gamebooks are an early example of hypertext fiction.

Production of new gamebooks in the West decreased dramatically during the nineties as choice based stories have moved away from print based media, although the format may be getting a new lease of life on mobile and ebook platforms. Such digital gamebooks are considered interactive fiction.

Gamebooks can be grouped into three families.

In all gamebooks, the story is presented as a series of sections of printed text. Branching-plot novel sections often run to several pages in length, whereas solitaire and adventure gamebook sections are usually no longer than a paragraph or two. At the end of a text section, the reader is usually given a choice of narrative branches that they may follow. Each branch contains a reference to the number of the paragraph or page that should be read next if that branch is chosen (e.g. to go north turn to section 98). The story continues this way until a paragraph or page which ends that branch of the story. In most solitaire or adventure gamebooks, there is usually one "successful" ending, and the remainder are "failures." Branching plot novels, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with narrative resolution rather than winning or losing, thus often have several endings which may be deemed "successful".

Gamebooks are typically written in the second person with the reader assuming the role of a character to experience the world from that character's point of view (e.g. 'you walk into the cold and dark forest').

Many titles are usually published in series containing several books, although individual gamebooks have also been published. While the books in many series are stand-alone narratives, others continue the narrative from the previous books in the series.

Several influences contributed to the development of the gamebook format during the twentieth century. The possibility of having stories branching out into several different paths seems to have been first suggested by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" (1941). This story features an author whose novel is a three-part story containing two branch points, and with nine possible endings. Another story by Borges, titled "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941), also describes a book with a maze-like narrative reminiscent of modern gamebooks. These stories, however, did not carry out the idea of branching-path narrative to full execution.

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Wikipedia