Choose Your Own Adventure

Maybe as a kid you enjoyed reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The basic concept was that you as the reader were presented with an interactive book in which you would choose different outcomes and, upon choosing, turn to different pages in the book, as directed, for the next part of the story. There was real risk for the characters in the story; it wouldn’t always end happily ever after. Through navigating through the maze of pages as you made story choices, you learned that consequences follow decisions. “The books were the brain child of 55-year-old Edward Packard, a Manhattan lawyer who gave up his law practice for full-time writing. … Packard got the idea for his first book while telling bedtime stories to his children in 1969. Stumped for an ending to one of his tales, he asked 9-year-old Caroline and 5-year-old Andrea … what they would do. Each came up with a different outcome” (Sandi Scaffetti, “Interactive Fiction: Young Readers Can ‘Choose Own Adventure,’” Beaver County Times, March 30, 1986, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2KwzAAAAIBAJ&pg=5210,5557358&dq=choose-your-own-adventure&hl=en).