Choose Your Own Adventure, or a different adventure entirely

These visu­al­iza­tions of Choose Your Own Adven­ture books are the best kind of data viz. Oh man. Chris­t­ian Swine­hart goes beyond mere cor­re­la­tion, way beyond eye candy. His narrative-crunching reveals new patterns—patterns I wouldn’t even have thought to won­der about. For instance: in a CYOA book, the story can end on any page. How are end­ings dis­trib­uted through­out a book? Now you know.

But, re: eye candy, it is of course all absolutely beau­ti­ful.

How­ever… in a project full of beauty, it’s not even the beauty I liked best. It was this detail, noted near the end, about the Choose Your Own Adven­ture book called UFO 54–40:

The branch dia­gram for UFO 54–40 is unique in that it has one ending—the Ultima ending—which is com­pletely dis­con­nected from the rest of the story. It exists as an island, unreach­able through choices but dis­cov­er­able thanks to the ran­dom access nature of the book.

An unreach­able end­ing. AN UNREACHABLE ENDING. And yet:

This end­ing was not just an easter egg for the obses­sive reader who didn’t mind skim­ming every page look­ing for tell­tale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual rif­fling. A two-page illus­tra­tion show­ing what could only be par­adise (or per­haps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book with­out any text. Flip­ping to the page before brings you to 101, where you dis­cover that your curios­ity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by fol­low­ing the con­straints of the sys­tem, but by going out­side of them—a fit­ting moral to the story and an encour­ag­ing reminder that any game should be a start­ing point for the imag­i­na­tion, not the end.

It’s the Kobayashi Maru! I am stunned and charmed.

Via Waxy and Noah Brier.

Update: Some CYOA con­text! Mark Sam­ple pro­vides a his­tory of Choose Your Own Adven­ture viz.

5 Responses

Mark Sample says:
November 10, 2009 at 9:47 pm
A whole meta-history could be writ­ten about the his­tory of data visu­al­iza­tions of CYOA books. The sub­ject seems to be a peren­nial favorite that sur­faces on the web every 6–12 months. 
As far as I can deter­mine, one of the first attempts was by Matthew Kirschen­baum, at the Uni­ver­sity of Maryland’s Insti­tute for Tech­nol­ogy in the Human­i­ties, who back in 2004 was ask­ing stu­dents to “map” Choose Your Own Adven­ture books. With Matt’s per­mis­sion, I bor­rowed, revised, and expanded upon the assign­ment for my “Tex­tual Media” classes at George Mason Uni­ver­sity. Here’s the lat­est ver­sion of the assign­ment, com­plete with my own map of CYOA #1, The Cave of Time.
My own inter­est in the map­ping of these ergodic texts lies in the moral struc­ture embed­ded within the nov­els, in which cer­tain choices are rewarded and oth­ers are not. I’m also fas­ci­nated by the assump­tions the books make about what con­sti­tutes a “failed” or “sat­is­fy­ing” end­ing; these assump­tions, as I try always try to con­vince my stu­dents, tell us a great deal about what we humans like and don’t like in the sto­ries we tell our­selves about ourselves.
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Bergamot says:
November 10, 2009 at 11:57 pm
I read a ton of CYOA books, and have a cou­ple of vague mem­o­ries, but one that stands out in my head was the time I found a con­ti­nu­ity loop (I’m pretty sure it was an over­sight on the author’s part) and spent the next few hours read­ing in circles.
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Noah Brier says:
November 11, 2009 at 4:41 am
That’s awe­some. In a search for more info on the Ultima end­ing I just ran across this Ask Metafil­ter thread on CYOA that’s worth a read as well: http://ask.metafilter.com/133125/A-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-that-you-couldnt-win
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Len says:
November 11, 2009 at 4:42 am
awe­some. I can’t believe the work that went into that web­page. Very satisfying.
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Len says:
November 11, 2009 at 4:46 am
Chris­t­ian Swine­hart has a PhD in Com­pu­ta­tional Neuroscience.
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