https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/
"My first experience with interactive media wasn’t mediated by any sort of
digital technology. Instead it came courtesy of a “technology” that was already
more than half a millennium old at the time: the printed book.
In the fall of 1980, I was eight years old, and doing my childish best to
adjust to life in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where my family had moved the
previous summer from the vicinity of Youngstown, Ohio. I was a skinny, frail
kid who wasn’t very good at throwing balls or throwing punches, which did
nothing to ease the transition. Even when I wasn’t being actively picked on, I
was bewildered at my new classmates’ turns of phrase (“I reckon,” “y’all,” “I’m
fixin’ to”) that I had previously heard only in the John Wayne movies I watched
on my dad’s knee. In their eyes, my birthplace north of the Mason Dixon Line
meant that I could be dismissed as just another clueless, borderline useless
“Yankee,” a heathen in the eyes of those who adhered to my new state’s twin
religions of Baptist Christianity and Friday-night football.
I found my refuge in my imagination. I was interested in just about everything
— a trait I’ve never lost, both to my benefit and my detriment in life — and I
could sit for long periods of time in my room, spinning out fantasies in my
head about school lessons, about books I’d read, about television shows I’d
seen, even about songs I’d heard on the radio. I actually framed this as a
distinct activity in my mind: “I’m going to go imagine now.” If nothing else,
it was good training for becoming a writer. As they say, the child is the
father of the man.
One Friday afternoon, I discovered a slim, well-thumbed volume in my elementary
school’s scanty library. Above the title
The Cave of Time was the now-iconic
Choose Your Own Adventure masthead, proclaiming it to be the first book in a
series. Curious as always, I opened it to the first page. I was precocious
enough to know what was meant by a first-person and third-person narrator of
written fiction, but this was something else: this book was written in the
second person."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
