"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."

Comments

Oh, really

[MrHanky]

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.

Digitized digital bookmarks.

[tacarat]

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 >.>

Re:does it have a point in this medium?

[cappp]

Yup. I've been rereading the old Lone Wolf gamebooks over at Project Aon which use the hypertext route really well. They've got a couple programs which let you run the books after download, all permitted under license of course, the one I'm enjoying using the most is Seventh Sense. It's a nice way of cutting down on the annoyances of using a book - keeping track of the math and the rules, losing your place - but there's something to be said for the charm of doing it oldschool.

Get real interactive fiction

[jewishbaconzombies]

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).

Re:does it have a point in this medium?

[bcmm]

The thing that made choose-your-own-adventure books interesting was essentially hacking a limited notion of interactivity into a non-interactive medium

And the iPhone is all about hacking a limited notion of interactivity into a fundamentally completely interactive medium...