Red Pill or Blue Pill?

By Hassan Mohamud

Ever wondered what your cat does when it ventures into the vast outdoors? Most of us don’t know for certain, but author Sherwin Tjia’s choose-your-own-adventure book, You Are A Cat!, gives the reader free rein to explore that question by chasing squirrels all day, among other things.

“The difficulty of writing from the perspective of a cat is that their choices, as well as how they affect the world around them, is limited,” explained the Montreal artist. “The things that move a human being are different from the things that move cats, but what’s interesting is that people are often themselves around felines in a way that they aren’t around other humans.”

Tjia also noted that the reader would be able to instantly understand nuances in the story that the cat protagonist simply could not and how that was a beneficial factor in the choice-making process.

“It was a lot of fun to put the cat in increasingly precarious situations despite it not always realizing their magnitude,” he said. “This is what later led me to up the ante and create a sequel about the same cat in a zombie apocalypse. There have been tons of those stories from the perspective of humans, but never from a cat.”

So what pages lead to deaths? And which pages advance the story? The associate publisher at Chooseco (Choose Your Own Adventure publishing company), Melissa Bounty, explained the different aspects of gamebooks that she works on with her writers and how that translates to the overall page turns/options.

“We don’t have a specific number of pages…every writer that we work with thinks about that construct in a different way,” she said. “One writer named Douglas Terman who is now deceased, created all these really perfect moments and compelling choices he wanted in his book on written index cards taped to a wall. He had the whole book plotted out on the wall before he sat down to write.”

Bounty detailed the writing style of the late Choose Your Own Adventure founder R.A. Montgomery, as simply sitting down and writing the book out from start to finish. However, he did apparently keep a list of all the page numbers and would cross them off as he wrote so as to “not duplicate a page.”

“Good or success endings versus bad or death endings come after the fact,” Bounty said. “Our writers write with a compelling story as the first mission and the structure is kind of affirmed by that. There isn’t a huge amount of predetermined structural influence that we are putting on the writers editorially other than sequencing the book effectively.”

Jerry Belich, creator of the computerized Choosatron arcade box, shared his viewpoint of choose-your-own-adventure stories from a technical direction.

“My parents had bought me a few choose-your-own-adventure books and I didn’t like most of them because I didn’t think the writing was very good, but I was really intrigued by the mechanics behind them,” he said. “That got me into creating simple adventures using BASIC on my first computer.”

Belich said that the influence those earlier years had on him led to his eventual journey to recreate the option-based stories he was accustomed to in a technological manner. He pointed to Carol Gaskin’s 1985 gamebook, Forgotten Towers, as his favourite of that time. His Choosatron invention is the culmination of his prior forays into the interactive world.

Belich described the Choosatron as a small box with a thermal printer like a receipt printer without any ink. The user puts in special paper and it heats up with a printer head as it comes out so that upon turning it on, the machine prints out a menu that has a number of stories to select from.

“When you pick a story, it will print out the first part of that story as well as at your choice-making junctions,” he said. “Eventually you’ll come to one of the endings in the story and at that point you basically tear it off like a receipt, effectively keeping that representation of your journey.”

Although gamebooks haven’t been particularly popular in recent years, Tjia sees a huge potential in the medium to do things previously not attempted.

“The medium is untapped because there are so many stories that we could tell,” he said. “ I was just in the bookstore yesterday and I saw a Neil Patrick Harris choose-your-own-adventure autobiography…the thing about these gamebooks is that they implicate you as the reader and that’s the great thing about this particular medium.”

Sherwin Tjia

For more on Sherwin check out his blog: janesheisaclerk.blogspot.ca

You can also follow him on Twitter @inconosolabecat

Choose Your Own Adventure

For more on them check out their site: CYOA.com

Jerry Belich & Choosatron

You can follow Jerry Belich on Twitter @j3rrytron

For more on Choosatron check out the site: Choosatron.com And follow their Twitter @choosatron

#geek #gamebooks