In life, having the power of choice is crucial for personal growth. This can make the reading experience more engaging as they become an active participant in the narrative. In interactive books, readers presented with various options are given the power to decide what path the story will take. The power of choice is essential in both Choose Your Own Adventure books and life because it allows us to take ownership of our decisions. In 2018, Netflix released an interactive streaming episode called “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” that allowed viewers to make choices through their streaming device.

While this style of book lost some popularity in the 1990s and 2000s, its structure has been adapted to other mediums such as video games, virtual reality, and interactive fiction. Such branching, storytelling narratives have since evolved. These books changed the medium from reading a book as a third party observer of someone else's story to one where you controlled your own experience. There was something compelling about seeing a world through the eyes of the protagonist, sometimes making choices you might make in real life, sometimes risking everything to see where you might end up. As a reader you became quickly vested in the decisions of the main character because you were responsible for making them. The elegance was in the simplicity of the narrative and limited but branching options. A few sentences to describe the current situation and then often a binary choice: Do this and turn to page X, or do this and turn to page Y. The style of writing was in the second person, using the pronoun “you,' to immerse the reader as the protagonist with decision-making agency. These interactive science fiction, fantasy, and horror books rose alongside Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. These books gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, with other publishers including Twistaplot and Which Way Books emerging.Ĭover image from the 'The Cave of Time' by Edward Packard This style of interactive fiction allowed readers to make choices throughout the narrative, leading to different outcomes. The success of 'The Cave of Time' led to a series of similar books published under the name Choose Your Own Adventure.

The book allowed readers to make choices throughout the story, leading to different paths and endings. This sounds like the structure of a video game storyboard, but it's actually the plot of an early interactive book called 'The Cave of Time' by Edward Packard, published in 1979. It occurs to you that the one leading down may go to the past, and the one leading up may go to the future. One curves down to the right the other leads up to the left. You are hiking in Snake Canyon when you find yourself lost in a strange, dimly lit cave.

The cave of time by edward packard