christian swinehart has a great essay up on his blog called ‘the rules of the game‘ about choose your own adventure books. i LOVED these when i was a kid (and, ok, i still love them – a shout out here to ‘lots of boys’) and would spend hours trying to get to every possible ending. this essay examines the structural differences choose your own adventure books have undergone over the years, as well as the patterns authors used to organize the books’ pages themselves, and it is all illustrated with beautifully designed infographics.

swinehart also includes animations of the reader paths through the books which i found to be hypnotizing, and in the colophon, a link to chris boraski’s fully-playable/readable html port of ‘zork: the cavern of doom’, on which swinehart has based his dynamic version of ‘zork’. in swinehart’s dynamic version, you can see a visualization of your progress á là his animations, which is very cool and quite elegant. use the links at the top of the main article page to see the animations, galleries, and play the game/read the book.