I love how casually detailed this article is. Touches like the subtly blinking blink tag -- and the subject matter itself -- lead me to believe there are gems here waiting to be discovered on subsequent reads.<p>"13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project"<p>From: <a href="http://etc.samizdat.cc/2009/11/the-rules-of-the-game" rel="nofollow">http://etc.samizdat.cc/2009/11/the-rules-of-the-game</a><p>Yes, this is an impressive effort.
Fantastic article. I just wanted to point out -- if you click on the links on the top left navigation, you can see the graphs/animations/etc for <i>every</i> book. This wasn't obvious until I read the entire article!
Down at the bottom is a link to a footnote with more information about the software and coding used:<p><a href="http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#fn3" rel="nofollow">http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#fn3</a><p>Edit:<p>Wow! I just found the digitized Choose Your Own Adventure book with jump history:<p><a href="http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork" rel="nofollow">http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork</a>
He's also created a digital version of a book that is browsable and shows your jump history here: <a href="http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork" rel="nofollow">http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/#/zork</a>
Christian Swinehart is at the top of his field, working for a legendary design company. <a href="http://samizdat.cc/me" rel="nofollow">http://samizdat.cc/me</a><p>Funny how because he's not a familiar tech name, everyone here assumes he's an upstart.
What a fantastic article. I wonder how more rules-oriented gamebook series [1] would fare in this type of analysis. They do tend to lead to an "ideal" ending, as the author noted, so perhaps they wouldn't be as interesting. The progression graphs would be interesting to see, though.<p>[1] Such as Joe Dever's wonderful <i>Lone Wolf</i> series. The republished versions available at projectaon.org --- and apparently back in print now --- are just as much fun as I remember.
I loved those books and I had a system for reading them. Each time I had to make a decision that involved me jumping to one page or another, I would fold the corner of the page. Each time I hit an endpoint, I would travel back to a folded page and then make a new decision to see where it would take me.<p>Funny how memory works. I don't think I've recalled my system for reading these books for years, perhaps more than a decade.