The Argentinean fantasist Jorge Luis Borges, one of best writers never to receive the Nobel Prize (pictured right), played with branching path narratives in some of his short stories of the 1940s.
Literary theorists call this type of story a branching path narrative, and it’s surprisingly new, given how long books have been around. If, as the Greek philosopher Aristotle claimed, a traditional story should have a beginning, middle and end, then gamebooks have a beginning, many middles, and one or many endings. Gamebook beginnings … and middles, and ends Except most gamebooks had more than one ending, so once you’d finished reading the first time you could go back and start over again, this time making an entirely different set of choices, resulting in a completely different story. Instead, you kept reading until you reached a fork in the story, turning to a different page every time you were asked to make a choice, until you reached the end of the book. If you want to run the other way, turn to page 5.” Gamebooks weren’t meant to be read through from beginning to end. A typical choice might go like this: “If you want to investigate the strange noise in the corridor, turn to page 34. You know you’re reading a gamebook when the book starts talking to you, asking what “You”, the reader, wants to do next. Gamebooks weren’t just a craze for a generation of people they were a cultural phenomenon, part of the shared zeitgeist.
#Rare fighting fantasy books series#
At least not until I say, “You know, like Choose Your Own Adventures.” Even though Choose Your Own Adventure books remain the best known of gamebooks, they were only one among many hundreds of series that collectively ran to thousands of individual titles. So it’s a little odd now when I say, “Oh, I collect gamebooks,” and people don’t know what I’m talking about. With their eye-catching cover design – colourful, cartoonish scenes of thrilling action set against a white background – and snappy titles like Prisoner of the Ant People and The Race Forever, the little paperbacks were damn near ubiquitous. Or maybe you would’ve seen some at school, or perhaps your best friend’s older brother had a box of them hidden away somewhere. If you grew up during the ‘80s or ‘90s, chances are you had a few Choose Your Own Adventure books on the bookshelf.