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"Choose Your Own Adventure" On Your iPhone
If you spent a good portion of your childhood reading the classic "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, you'll be glad to know that you can soon waste countless hours at work turning to random pages on your iPhone. Edward Packard, one of the original authors of the series, has helped create an app called U-Ventures which uses special effects to create a story in the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure format. From the article: "The first U-Venture is a sort of a sequel to a classic title, The Cave of Time. In 'Return to the Cave of Time,' the U-Venture, 'you go back in the cave — you don't have a choice on that,' Packard tells NPR's Neal Conan. But from that point on, the reader chooses her own course."
Is anything so simple and trivial that it can be done in basic HTML suddenly news when you can add the words "on the iPhone"? Still, after all these years? It's as if Slashdot has a spam filter that is automatically bypassed by the phrase.
I'm writing some text adventures for iPhone and Android at the moment. Beaten to market by a few months! Ah well, it's a pretty obvious update to the old books. I imagine we'll see a lot of these. They can be pretty fun.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The thing that made choose-your-own-adventure books interesting was essentially hacking a limited notion of interactivity into a non-interactive medium, by asking users to manually enact GOTOs. But on a computer, we have interaction sort of built in, so the hack is uninteresting. Sure, you can still do it, and people might still like reading them, but it's not really its own category of thing, and we've had it forever. You can do it with a set of HTML pages linked to each other, or before that, with hypercard pages, and people actually did so, a long time ago, and did it more interestingly.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ten years ago who would have believed Slashdot would turn into an Apple PR/SPAM site?
Mr. PACKARD: Well, we have a bookmark feature. So, for instance, if you get to a choice and - you can bookmark that page. And then if you go on, you make your choice and you go on to various other adventures and you finally come to an ending, but you want to see what would have happened if you go and made the other choice, you can go back there. But otherwise, you know, you get to the end of the story. We don't want to make it - we didn't want to make it so you just could flip back and forth aimlessly like some kind of computer game. We wanted to make it where there's a real story, and it goes on and on surprisingly long and - or usually, unless you come to a bad ending.
Oh good. I was worried there wouldn't be a way to do this. I vaguely remembering keeping two to three fingers firmly inserted in various sections of the book to backtrack if I made bad choices. I wonder if my imaginary /. girlfriend appreciates what I learned by doing this in the 3rd grade >.>
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
"The first U-Venture is a sort of a sequel to a classic title, The Cave of Time. In 'Return to the Cave of Time,'..."
That's not "sort of," that is a direct sequel.
But from that point on, the reader chooses her own course.
What if the reader is a male? Or, is this absurd example of political correctness meant to suggest that only females will use this application. What is wrong with the word " their "? Using the word "their" actually lets the sentence makes sense rather than sounding idiotic.
Change the phrase in the summary to: But from that point on, the reader chooses their own course. It's common sense, not fucking rocket science. It also keeps everyone happy because it's genderless.
Get Frotz for the iPhone or iPad, and play real interactive fiction instead. The interface could use some help in the way it gets stories in / out, but I've been (re)-enjoying my infocom collection from my old "lost treasures of infocom" CDs on my mobile devices just fine (hint : keep safari handy and bookmark the support docs).
Of course, you could just get Fabled Lands, which is as sandbox'y as those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books can get. No idea if java runs on the iStuff though.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Deathtrap Dungeon are out in the iPhone now. I believe Citadel of Chaos is too, not entirely sure.
I have the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and the second Creature of Havoc comes out I'll be buying that one too.
Cheers,
Ian
On the one hand, this seems to be a simple and trivial app that could easily have been done with HTML. On the other hand, Edward Packard is an absolute master of the format. I can't imagine Hyperspace will have held up over the decades, but I still have the urge to track down my copy.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Can't spell, and your creativity ends at having an amusing background on your lock screen? There's an app for that.
I liked the FMV ones like silent steel. But alot of the other ones sucked real bad.
Does any one have a iso of all 3 disks of Flash Traffic: City of Angels?
Choice? Oh man. Steve Jobs isn't going to like this.
I only ever made it through 2 of those books in my youth because that's all I could afford, but I loved the RPG aspect of the book over CYOA books (a favorite of mine when I was even younger).
xyzzy !!
I'm on my own "choose your adventure" story. It is sometimes called "real life." ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This is not really a first on the iphone, it has been done by others a long time ago. Check out a "choose your own adventure" manga called Foxfire: http://bit.ly/7GvnZU
Port the InfoCom stuff. And Colossal Cave. Render the glowing, green text to resemble the phosphor of a slump-back Tektronix terminal, like the computing labs had in 1979.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I understand it's popular in some cities like New York and San Francisco.
I hear it's called "Get a Decent Signal Adventure."
The problem is no matter how many times you go back, the story ends the same way. You're dead.
Rack me.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
$3.99? Really, I just went to buy it out of nostalgia, i loved those books. But 3.99 for an iphone app? Thats of limited use? Not a chance.
If all I can do is follow the links, how I will get to the good ending of Inside UFO 54-40?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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Remember the movie Big? His huge, genius idea at the end of the movie that blows everyone away is a computerized comic book that lets kids choose their own adventure. He and the woman he slept with (in spite of the fact that he was actually 14... Somehow I don't think that would have flown in "13 Going On 30") claimed it would cost about 18 dollars. I don't know if they meant "per cartridge", and that the actual game system would cost about 1000 dollars, but I've always been pretty offended by the film's implication that this was a successful plan in 1988.
I just watched Big for the first time in like a decade or two, and they totally had this idea in there. Funny to see this coming out in the 21st century instead of hoverboards... I'd love to see that iPad app. Strap one iPad to each foot and go!
Haven't they had one of these available for a long time. An adventure that only a small percentage can ever make it through to the end. I think they call it "customer service".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Here is Mario in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:
Choose Your Own Adventure World 1-1
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I agree. And here in the UK, even the public funded BBC will be happy to give national coverage for your Iphone App, even if it's as trivial as just displaying an image. Next time I write an application, I'll be sure to submit a press release to them.
So much for the lie that the BBC don't advertise.