1) CYOA – One Book, Many Readings<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0He 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. \u00a0From 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. \u00a0From my understanding, this intent can be conveyed through the movement rules themselves. \u00a0A good example of this I think is one of the homeplay games, “Everybody Dies”. \u00a0Playing 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. \u00a0This is also evident in the article’s example describing\u00a0UFO 54-40.<\/em>\u00a0Here, 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.<\/p>\n 2) Computer Lib\/Dream Machines<\/p>\n One of ideas that stood out to me the most in this reading is the following:<\/p>\n “The designer of responding computer systems is creating\u00a0unified setups for viewing and manipulating things\u2014and\u00a0the feelings, impressions and sense of things that go with\u00a0them. Our goal should be nothing less than REPRESENTING\u00a0THE TRUE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF HUMAN THOUGHT.\u00a0”<\/p>\n This thought too addresses the question of motivation behind designing these branching systems for data and where that motivation is most evident. \u00a0Nelson 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). \u00a0This 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. \u00a0This is intriguing when the same line of thought is applied back to the CYOA branches that occurs in the discipline of literature. \u00a0What 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. \u00a0Even with non-CYOA narrative there is a larger branching structure that may be unapparent to the reader but is\u00a0intrinsically\u00a0buried beneath the surface that connects all the thoughts, influences, and decisions that lead to the creation of the narrative in the first place.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. \u00a0He explains how, in this way, CYOA differs from other literary forms by swaying the reader to focus more on<\/p>\n