Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? Published in 1979 by Bantam Books, it was a revolutionary venture into interactive fiction, and it hit me like an atomic bomb. I spent countless hours exploring each book’s full complement of alternative endings, and put at least that much time into creating my own series of adventures. It’s safe to say that the CYOA books really stimulated my imagination in ways that standard fiction simply could not have.
For you parents who might have been decrying the lack of similarly engaging content in the digital age, we now have the opportunity to re-experience the magic on our iPhones, courtesy of ChooseCo and Magnetism Studios. The first adventure to be released is “Return to Atlantis”, by the famed CYOA scribe R. A. Montgomery. As hoped, the app is no less than a faithful recreation of the actual text, complete with illustrations. For only $0.99, one hopes that it will be successful, as we can then look forward to digital ports of the entire series.
If you haven’t ever experienced the joy of cracking one of these CYOA books, the draw is simple: at the end of each passage of narrative, the reader is asked to decide which action of two choices to take next. The reader then proceeds to the referred page, and the adventure continues. Each book has multiple endings, and the fun of guessing what comes next, and going back to choose different paths truly sparks some exciting activity in the minds of those who participate. There’s something powerful in putting into a child’s hands the ability to make decisions. There’s also a lot to be said for making concrete the idea that there are many ways that any one scenario can go, and thus, no situation, no matter how dreadful-seeming, is entirely hopeless. This can be helpful if a child is fearful of the future, because it’s easy for one’s mind to dwell only on a disastrous outcome. To live in hope is a far better way than to dwell in fear.
