{"id":1181,"date":"2011-02-22T11:41:05","date_gmt":"2011-02-22T10:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=1181"},"modified":"2011-02-21T12:21:32","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T11:21:32","slug":"a-history-of-choose-your-own-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2011\/02\/22\/a-history-of-choose-your-own-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Choose Your Own Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Slate has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2282786\/pagenum\/all\/\">nice write-up on the history of <em>choose your own adventure<\/em> books<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, the article has a reference to Borges&#8217; <em>Garden of Forking Paths<\/em>, but there is more detail to the history than I have seen before. I did not know (or had forgotten) that B.F. Skinner was part of the story.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">A more prosaic early attempt at interactive texts were psychologist B.F.  Skinner&#8217;s &#8220;programmed learning&#8221; books that culminated with Doubleday&#8217;s  interactive TutorText series, which debuted in 1958 with the thrilling <em>The Arithmetic of Computers<\/em>.  Basically an extended multiple-choice quiz, a correct answer sent you  forward in the text while an incorrect answer sent you to a page  explaining just how wrong you were. But all of these efforts were  eclipsed by the bedtime story Edward Packard told his two daughters in  1969.<\/p>\n<p id=\"firstHeading\">Julio Cort\u00e1zar&#8217;s 1963 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hopscotch_%28Julio_Cort%C3%A1zar_novel%29\"><em>Hopscotch<\/em><\/a> novel goes unmentioned though. And you could have discussed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oulipo.net\/\">OuLiPo<\/a>. I can&#8217;t help but wonder if there are more non-English branching narratives that we have neglected.<\/p>\n<p>(Via <a href=\"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2011\/02\/choose-from-1-ending-to-this-blog-post\/\">Nick Montfort<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Slate has a nice write-up on the history of choose your own adventure books. As usual, the article has a reference to Borges&#8217; Garden of Forking Paths, but there is more detail to the history than I have seen before. I did not know (or had forgotten) that B.F. Skinner was part of the story. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2011\/02\/22\/a-history-of-choose-your-own-adventure\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A History of Choose Your Own Adventure&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}