Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books
What your weapon of choice has to do with the evolution of storytelling.
Remember Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, the interactive fiction hit of the 80’s? Designer Christian Swinehart is dissecting the genre in CYOA — an incredibly ambitious atomic-level structural analysis of a dataset of 12 such books, visualizing all the possible reader paths within the narrative.
The color-coded visualizations divide the plot of each book into different structural elements and groups based on the number of choices offered and how positive or negative the story ending is. The twelve books are then laid out chronologically, each arranged into rows of ten pages to better reveal their structural patterns. You can even explore each of the narratives as an animated visualization.
This visual dissection of literature reminds us of Stefanie Posavec’s Writing Without Words, though Swinehart’s approach is much less abstract and far more technically elaborate.
While CYOA books may seem like a fad of the past, they’re actually an early example of much of the non-linear storytelling and interactive narratives that take place on the web today — jumping around book pages, constructing your own story, is a lot like exploring a blog through its tag cloud rather than reading the entries sequentially, or skimming your RSS reader with articles from different publishers showing up in a shared timeline, or just hopping around your countless browser tabs.
What makes Swinehart’s CYOA visualizations noteworthy is that they offer insight not only into the structural patterns of the genre, but also into its evolution, revealing a gradual decline in possible endings — the earlier books show a colorful mix of reds and oranges, the middle of the story outcome polarity spectrum, while in the later ones a single favorable ending, in yellow or blue, tends to emerge.
And we hope this isn’t a prophetic metaphor for where the evolution of modern storytelling is headed — but we have to agree with artist and explorer Jonathan Harris, who has spoken up against the sad homogenization of the web. In an era where anyone can be the co-creator of our collective story, it’s all the more important to preserve the authenticity of voices and the diversity of proverbial “reader paths.”
Explore CYOA and think about the endings you’re choosing for your own stories through the kinds of content and narratives you engage with daily, both online and off.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
- Gift Guide Part One: Books 10 eclectic, boundary-spanning books bound to delight and enlighten...
- Alphabet Books Rethought Three inspired examples of innovation on the most rudimentary gateway to language and literature: The alphabet book...
- Analog Infoviz: Hand- Painted Visualizations Ward Shelley's wonderful hand-painted visualizations in oil offer a dose of candor, humor and delightful one-point-ohness....
- The Ancient Book of Sex and Science Four Pixar animators release a racy side project....
- We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion Four years and 12 million feelings later, a book by visualization artist and storyteller Jonathan Harris that lives up to its grand expectations....
What “choose your own adventure” books have to do with the evolution of storytelling. http://bit.ly/2IC8mK [fighting homogenization]
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @tdebaillon: What “choose your own adventure” books have to do with the evolution of storytelling. http://bit.ly/2IC8mK [fighting hom …
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nonsequential Narratives – ambitious atomic-level visualizations of Choose Your Own Adventure books http://is.gd/4Z9CX #storytelling
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @brainpicker: Nonsequential Narratives – ambitious atomic-level visualizations of Choose Your Own Adventure books http://is.gd/4Z9CX …
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books http://bit.ly/ToOh8
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books:
http://bit.ly/3RFkI3
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
numbering nonlinear story pattern @jranck: Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books | Brain Pickings http://bit.ly/8629ag fascinating
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @jranck Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books | Brain Pickings http://bit.ly/8629ag fascinating
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books: http://bit.ly/3RFkI3
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
“Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books”: http://tinyurl.com/y8lrxa9 @brainpicker
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@gautamjohn @prathambooks This post about non-linear story-telling may be an interesting read for you guys http://bit.ly/3RFkI3 #Ubercool
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books http://bit.ly/6JhsjO, http://bit.ly/2vcpVo (Via @sanjeevn )
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books http://bit.ly/6VFvfg
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
[...] Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books | Brain Pickings Posté en Nouvelles Interfaces par bettyletourneur à 2 décembre 2009 Nonsequential Narratives: Hypertextual Books | Brain Pickings [...]
[...] love books. And we love nontraditional takes on the traditional. Recently, we’ve looked at hypertextual books, ambitious carved-out reproductions of history books and Pictorial Webster’s. Today, we look [...]
[...] foot traffic in a 1950’s house, the hundred monkey effect, and the hypertextual narrative of Choose Your Own Adventure [...]
[...] cultural touchstones, from the highs to the lows. Navigating its universe is like playing a Choose Your Own Adventure with one of history’s greatest philosophers as the protagonist. The best part is that you can [...]