1) CYOA – One Book, Many Readings
In this article, the author goes into great detail on how CYOA books create a great sense of spatial understanding necessary to read through them, through movement rules. He explains how, in this way, CYOA differs from other literary forms by swaying the reader to focus more on finding different ways through the story’s space and less on the story’s actual conclusion. From this standpoint, reading this article made me reflect on how to approach CYOA as an author, in particular when it comes to conveying one’s intent for creating such a story. From my understanding, this intent can be conveyed through the movement rules themselves. A good example of this I think is one of the homeplay games, “Everybody Dies”. Playing this game, I found that I learned about the character development mostly through the narrative, but I discovered more about the author’s perspective through the limitations and later “freedoms” (such as the ability to control multiple characters at once) of moving through the story’s space. This is also evident in the article’s example describing UFO 54-40. Here, as with every other classic CYOA layout, the reader can move around by following the rules of CYOA but eventually these typical rules must be broken to “finish” the adventure; in other words, the author creates a hidden rule that says break the typical rules of CYOA to “play” my story, and you won’t really get anywhere until you accept the author’s intent of creating a rule-breaking CYOA.
2) Computer Lib/Dream Machines
One of ideas that stood out to me the most in this reading is the following:
“The designer of responding computer systems is creating unified setups for viewing and manipulating things—and the feelings, impressions and sense of things that go with them. Our goal should be nothing less than REPRESENTING THE TRUE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF HUMAN THOUGHT. ”
This thought too addresses the question of motivation behind designing these branching systems for data and where that motivation is most evident. Nelson is also presenting the argument that the answer is the structure of the design itself (just as in the CYOA article, the rules themselves express the purpose of the author). This idea is interesting in this larger context of presenting information about our entire world, in particular because this structure is, according to Nelson, supposed to mirror the way human thought works; how it makes connections across information, subjects, and disciplines. This is intriguing when the same line of thought is applied back to the CYOA branches that occurs in the discipline of literature. What can then be suggested is that presenting a story in such a way is a better mirror of how the “narrative of life” plays out; nothing is actually pre-determined, but rather every so often there are choices to be made that lead to different consequences. Even with non-CYOA narrative there is a larger branching structure that may be unapparent to the reader but is intrinsically buried beneath the surface that connects all the thoughts, influences, and decisions that lead to the creation of the narrative in the first place.
