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Like many in my age-group, in the early eighties I was ga-ga over the Choose Your Own Adventure series. I still feel an unusual amount of nostalgia for their ilk, and when I think of them today, they contained every adventure trope a kid of my type in the eighties could want, with a level of adaptable interactivity that was wholly new at the time. My favorite volume in the original series (of which I had only a few) was, surprise, Treasure Diver. My father and I often read this one together (he always read to me when he got home from work, often quite late, and this was a big part of my boyhood), and I could tell he enjoyed its real-world setting more than he would, say, You Are a Shark(!), or Prisoner of the Ant People. According to Gamebooks.org (an amazing site listing and describing all details regarding the incredible array of all such books), Treasure Diver had nineteen discrete endings. To my recollection, twenty-one of these endings resulted in death. I drowned, I was eaten by sharks, I was killed by pirates, I was trapped in an underwater dome belonging to Dr. No, I was eaten by pirates, I suffered from gold doubloon poisoning, I got "the bends" and exploded, I fell in love with Mindy the One-Eyed Stripper and ended up in a South Carolina trailer park with rickets. It was a real horrorshow, and undoubtedly a crucial educational experience for a seven year old.
My favorite series, though, was the Time Machine sequence, where enterprising young boys and girls could experience the Holocaust or the Mexican Revolution, take a break and watch Diff'rent Strokes, and return to something else, perhaps the death of all dinosaurs. Great fun and interesting design. I had the complete series, which was published up until 1988 (I like to stick with things, even if I'm too old and they're out of fashion, duh), though I find I only have the first four of them in my possession today. I read Civil War Secret Agent (was there ever a more appealing confluence?) until the cover came off, and I can still remember phrases from it, and the scene where you meet Harriet Tubman. You couldn't die in the Time Machine books, either, which was of great appeal to me after the endless reincarnation cycle of Treasure Diver. The worst that could happen was getting trapped in time or failing your mission, which is pretty fair on the part of the authors, when you think about it.I took a few of these books out last night, and tried to read one of the Endless Quest books (Dungeons & Dragons got in on the act), called Pillars of Pentegarn, knowing that my sensible adult intellect, and my knowledge of The Lord of the Rings films, would assist in a quick victory. I was killed three times. I tell you, in these books, as in the life of an editor of sci-fi, it is the arbitrary decisions that reward and the carefully considered ones that kill.
Personally, I must admit I am not much a fan of today's "interactive" things (though learning museums were always quite fun), and I generally tend to enjoy traditional, slow, go at your own pace activities. I like video games, but I refuse to play online games. I enjoy the internet, but I most prefer to read it and not participate (with a few exceptions, obviously) in its circus. I like having choices, but not too many choices—I might even add that the lack of choice, it seems to me, has an untapped capability to grow a person far more than unlimited choices can ever do. I believe in making peace with the decisions made, because you're never allowed to surreptitiously keep your finger on the previous page in case you die horribly when you turn to page 96 in real life (though there have been moments where I've felt I'd peeked). Often the interactive things seem like so much fad, like blogging or Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks, just a thing of today to be replaced by something other in the endless parade of distractions, another entertaining blinder. I get tired with all the endless varieties which allow me to indulge small parts of myself (though if they go back to making one kind of jean again, I'll surely die) despite the overall withering of a unified self-image. When I browse the internet, I become tired and unsure, the boat come untethered from the dock, and it's sometimes hard to see the value in any of it, aside from making it easier to buy CDs and ... well, that's almost all I use it for. Buying CDs and reading LJ. That's the whole of the internet for me. Page 23 and page 106. I'll take the backyard, I think, page 574.
geeky
I wish I hadn't gotten rid of most of my choose your own adventure and Time Machine books for space considerations. The one about the Mexican Revolution was really well-written!
the D&D series seemed to vary in harshness depending on author (the others too no doubt). There's an ending in Pentagarn where your girl gets turned into a skeleton and that was vaguely traumatic. I preferred this series to the Choose your own Adventure books because there was slightly more continuity; it felt more like a "series". Still, if the ending was bad I would just skim it and try to go back to where I'd been.
They made over forty of them! I think I only had a few.
eleven of the endings involve eating seals
oh my
Do you take requests for Quiet Sounds?
How 'bout a themed podcast revolving around the "sound of electricity"?
I'd love to do that theme, but I'm limited by the music in my collections. I wonder if I have enough "electric" ambient to fill a whole 'cast.
Edited at 2008-05-01 01:07 pm (UTC)
Blood Hag was all right. They sound like any thrashy metal band that plays short novelty songs, but the between-song banter about authors was priceless. Apparently they were doing a "family friendly" show part of the time (so they said) because the songs went from children's/family classics authors to young adult writers to adults only authors. They threw a Marion Zimmer Bradley book at my head and I took it home.