“Choose Your Own Adventure: One Book, Many Readings”, 2009 (; similar):
[Visualizing CYOA by generating graphs and coloring events by desirability; Swinehart observes distinct patterns in network types, harshness, linearity, and highlights various curious anomalies and tricks CYOA books could play on the reader.]
…To get a sense for the distribution of pages within the actual CYOA books, I’ve prepared a dataset of 12 books. The earliest dates from 1979 and at the later edge are a handful from 1986. They are laid out chronologically (or according to series order for books released in the same year) with the oldest at the top left and more recent books below. Each book has been arranged into rows of 10 pages apiece.
In scanning over the distribution of colors in this plot, one clear pattern is a gradual decline in the number of endings. The earliest books (in the top row) are awash in reds and oranges, with a healthy number of ‘winning’ endings mixed in. Later CYOA books tended to favor a single ‘best’ ending (see CYOA 44 & 53). The most extreme case of this was actually not a Choose Your Own Adventure book at all but a gamebook offshoot of the Zork text adventure series. The Cavern of Doom (labeled WDIDN 3 above) has a virtually linear progression where endings later in the book are increasingly better than those on earlier pages. This is reflected in the nearly unbroken spectrum from red to blue when scanning down the rows. The one outlier is the catastrophic ending seen in the third row from the bottom. This was a punishment page that could only be reached by cheating. Unlike most other endings in the book it does not offer to let you continue the story from a few pages back but instead calls you a cheater and leaves you with no choice but to start over from the beginning. Another surprising change over time is the decline in the number of choices in the books. The mess of light grey boxes in the top row gives way to books like A New Hope (CYOASW 1) which have more pages devoted to linear narrative than to decisions and endings combined. But to address this apparent pattern with more rigor it would be best to look at the numbers of pages in each category independent of their placement in the book.
…I’d be very curious to know the reason for this progression toward linearity. Presumably the invisible hand was guiding this development, but whether the hunger was for less difficulty in the books or simply for something with more in the way of traditional storytelling is harder to unravel. I could also imagine that this balance between interaction and exposition was peculiar to the individual writers, so this could merely reflect a changing set of practitioners.