Two roads diverged
October 18th 2008 01:53
Before Final Fantasy and the rest of the Super NES’s stable of amazing RPGs, there was Dungeons and Dragons. Similarly, years before World of Warcraft gave us the freedom to travel the width of Azeroth in a leisurely sequence of breakdance moves, there was Choose Your Own Adventure. The series did not, interestingly, invent the idea of a novel with more than one ending; I'm told the first such thing was published by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941. It was the first one marketed and distributed as popular fiction, though, and the books remain a cult favorite and items of interest to collectors of the early modern era of gaming. The series was even referenced in Family Guy, and you generally don’t see that happening unless the subject has contributed something to the collective consciousness.
The original Choose Your Own Adventure series paved the way for the sub-genre of the gamebook. Through the 1980s, the games became more and more detailed, and the settings tended towards fantasy, perhaps as the writers remembered the Dungeons and Dragons campaigns of their youth. It’s easy to see the parallel – the gamebook is basically a one-player role-playing game, with the author playing the role of dungeon master except that he wrote all the details of the encounters in advance and submitted them to you in writing. Depending on how you look at it, that could be a disadvantage compared to regular role-playing, although anyone who’s ever had a DM who used phrases like “There’s a table with a bunch of stuff on it” might disagree. There are more concrete differences, though, mostly the issue of rules enforcement (how is the author to know that you didn’t check both paths before choosing?) and that you don’t generally have quite as much freedom as you would in conventional role-playing. Some books are better about that last point than others – there are a surprising number of instructions in Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series that are some variation of “If you wish to open the coffin and stick your head inside, turn to page 235.”
The differences were clearly in writers’ minds, as they went out of their way to design the adventures with the second or third or 9,000th reading in mind. Choose Your Own Adventure, and many of its followers, had more than one possible ending based on choices you made in the course of reading the book. Others, such as Lone Wolf, checked whether or not you’d read earlier books in the series or even whether you’d visited specific places; if you had, the related path would re-use a memorable scenery character or give you a chance to use previously discovered special items to your advantage (or disadvantage; The Cauldron of Fear’s Zakhan Kimah encounter is one of the most difficult in the entire series, but especially if the reader has played previous books and possesses the legendary Sommerswerd – if so, he fights a version of the character whose Combat Skill is ten points higher than on the other path).
Some of these tropes were later picked up by video games, especially in the second half of the 1990s as processing power multiplied. The original Silent Hill game had four different endings; some newer games have even more. Space Quest 4 had a section involving time travel where you revisited events from the first three games, making it a concrete advantage to have played them and thus know what was supposed to happen. The Baldur’s Gate saga let you export your character at the end of the first game and play the second where you left off, although it took your items away in the process.
You don’t hear so much about the gamebook any more; many people who like the idea of customizability and personalization are attracted to things like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. The appeal of the electronic game’s graphics and fully-voiced NPCs are very real and very understandable. But books have a few favorable characteristics of their own, including their discrete nature and collectibility, not to mention the creativity involved in writing the text and drawing the illustrations, which is no less impressive than that involved in game design. I would like to believe that there is still a place for gamebooks – and more broadly, any books – even in the era of the MMORPG.
Don't be fooled by the cute art. These books can be extremely frustrating.
The original Choose Your Own Adventure series paved the way for the sub-genre of the gamebook. Through the 1980s, the games became more and more detailed, and the settings tended towards fantasy, perhaps as the writers remembered the Dungeons and Dragons campaigns of their youth. It’s easy to see the parallel – the gamebook is basically a one-player role-playing game, with the author playing the role of dungeon master except that he wrote all the details of the encounters in advance and submitted them to you in writing. Depending on how you look at it, that could be a disadvantage compared to regular role-playing, although anyone who’s ever had a DM who used phrases like “There’s a table with a bunch of stuff on it” might disagree. There are more concrete differences, though, mostly the issue of rules enforcement (how is the author to know that you didn’t check both paths before choosing?) and that you don’t generally have quite as much freedom as you would in conventional role-playing. Some books are better about that last point than others – there are a surprising number of instructions in Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series that are some variation of “If you wish to open the coffin and stick your head inside, turn to page 235.”
The differences were clearly in writers’ minds, as they went out of their way to design the adventures with the second or third or 9,000th reading in mind. Choose Your Own Adventure, and many of its followers, had more than one possible ending based on choices you made in the course of reading the book. Others, such as Lone Wolf, checked whether or not you’d read earlier books in the series or even whether you’d visited specific places; if you had, the related path would re-use a memorable scenery character or give you a chance to use previously discovered special items to your advantage (or disadvantage; The Cauldron of Fear’s Zakhan Kimah encounter is one of the most difficult in the entire series, but especially if the reader has played previous books and possesses the legendary Sommerswerd – if so, he fights a version of the character whose Combat Skill is ten points higher than on the other path).
Techniques for balancing high-level adventures, volume I: give the other guy an item that makes him invulnerable to the player's weapon.
Some of these tropes were later picked up by video games, especially in the second half of the 1990s as processing power multiplied. The original Silent Hill game had four different endings; some newer games have even more. Space Quest 4 had a section involving time travel where you revisited events from the first three games, making it a concrete advantage to have played them and thus know what was supposed to happen. The Baldur’s Gate saga let you export your character at the end of the first game and play the second where you left off, although it took your items away in the process.
You don’t hear so much about the gamebook any more; many people who like the idea of customizability and personalization are attracted to things like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. The appeal of the electronic game’s graphics and fully-voiced NPCs are very real and very understandable. But books have a few favorable characteristics of their own, including their discrete nature and collectibility, not to mention the creativity involved in writing the text and drawing the illustrations, which is no less impressive than that involved in game design. I would like to believe that there is still a place for gamebooks – and more broadly, any books – even in the era of the MMORPG.
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