Europhile: C'est ma vie!

Choose Your Own Adventure ?

There were these books I used to read, when I was a kid, called "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories. I'm not sure if they had actual titles or not. After all, what would you call a book where the main characters switched around, there were 13 different plot lines, and the endings ran the gamut from living happily ever after on Mars to drowning in a puddle in Massachussetts ? But however they were titled or untitled, these books were undoubtedly the most fascinating thing to come along since Ninja Gaiden 2 came out for Nintendo. And I had quite a collection of them. At least, I think I did. Maybe it was only one book, but it sure had a lot of endings.

The most amazing thing about the "Choose Your Own Adventure" (my lawyer tells us we can just say "CYOA") books, is that though fascinating, they are undoubtedly the most frustrating kind of book imaginable. A kind of book where trying to fall asleep with the knowledge that your character had just perished thanks to a rampaging aardvark (or some similarly strange occurrence) was not only possible, it was frighteningly regular. Yet something would inexplicably bring you back, paging through the book to your last decisions to see what you could change. You just knew that if you made the right choices you would escape the aardvark, get the girl, and fly away on your shiny silver spaceship to live happily ever after on Mars. You knew it instinctively. (And you knew it because you read the last chapter preemptively. That was just what you did with CYOA books).

I sometimes wonder what it was that was so attractive about these books. Maybe it was the promise of perfection waiting just over the horizon. Maybe it was the freedom of pretending like you were the hero. And maybe it was the embarrassment of your choices leading to the hero's untimely and rather shameful death. Or maybe it was just practice for the CYOA stories of real life. The ones grown-ups call choices.

But I think it was because, secretly, we all wanted to get the girl and fly away on our shiny silver spaceship.

posted by europhile @ 11:37