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Does anyone else enjoy choose your own adventure stories/games?

I remember reading the choose your own adventure books when I was a kid, then a few years back I found sites such as Choose Your Story and Choice of Games (I've even bought some of their games on Steam). If you do like them, do you have any favourite stories or sites? Maybe we can connect as fellow CYOA lovers!

I'm sure you could guess that I'm pretty into the CYOA idea, given my favorite type of Werewolf to host, as well as my continuous attempts to try to get an actual coherent game of CYOA going here on Wintreath.

Hell, when AOL was still a thing and its chatrooms were still popular, I hosted a Choose Your Own Adventure type of game in one of the Trivia chatrooms known as Trivia and Games (aka TAG).  Basically, people would choose their path through the carefully crafted stories, and on the way they'd be met with various types of trivia questions or puzzles that they'd have to solve to move on.

Actually, if I could find a way to craft it, it wouldn't be a bad version to try to host in Wintreath someday.

Funny enough, however...I've never read any of the CYOA books, and the closest I've played when it comes to the games are the old point and click titles that gave you multiple ways to play.

The closest I read to the CYOA books was the secondary Goosebumps books, Give Yourself Goosebumps.  I found them to be pretty fascinating with how they let you pick the story's fate, and I always wanted to get into the actual CYOA books, but I just never did.

That really didn't stop me from really getting into the concept of it, though. 

Yeah, I used to love the choose your own adventure books as a kid. Those would always be the first books I read in libraries. For the first read, I'd choose what I'd do in the situation, but afterward I'd follow each branch to read all the different possibilities, which I loved. Suppose that's carried over from my childhood as when I play video games where choices matter, I tend to throw myself in researching all the different possibilities and their consequences more than actually playing the games. I've never seen an actual CYOA game, though, so I'll need to check out those websites.

I adored those. I used to have an entire shelf of some old ones, but we gave them away a couple years ago since I wasn't reading them so much. I had a bad habit of reading the opening segment and then reading all the pages in order and only once done trying to figure out how the start landed in all those possibilities... and then doing it properly. I dabbled in the Hitchkiker's Guide and other text based adventure games, but those usually had one main path to follow and multiple bad endings rather than a whole shaping of the narrative. While I never got hold of the Fighting Fantasy books, I've watched other people toy with and lose to the series (but apparently there are PDFs and gamified visual novels of that series, so I know what I'll be doing when I have time). And then in more recent years I've been getting into quests, which are basically RPs but with one main writer and a freely open voting system on what the narrative should do. But yeah, I absolutely enjoy CYOA stories.

Liked them a lot as a child, but then I discovered Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect.

Do VNs count?

Virtual novels as I saw someone mentioned I like, but only if they have enough choices.

Those with no choices suck usually.

Two of my favourite games are Life is strange, and life is strange before the storm. It's almost it's own genre though.

Long story is a cute mobile game also with choices.

Interesting, isn't one of the key parts of visual novels the fact that you need to make important choices?

I love CYOA games! When I was a kid I had an entire shelf of Goosebumps books. R.L. Stine was the only author worth mentioning to me before high school! I actually frequent Choice of Games website quite often. I've bought Life of a Wizard and NOLA is Burning myself. Ran Life of a Wizard on the TRR RMB using polls and a dispatch like two years ago. It was very popular. It petered out when I couldn't remember to keep it updated though.

Virtual novels as I saw someone mentioned I like, but only if they have enough choices.

Those with no choices suck usually.

Two of my favourite games are Life is strange, and life is strange before the storm. It's almost it's own genre though.

Long story is a cute mobile game also with choices.

I actually almost forgot about the games!  Life is Strange and Before the storm are two of my favorites, as well as Detroit: Become Human, Until Dawn and Heavy Rain.

What I like about the latter three specifically is that the ending for them isn't set in stone.  One of Life is Strange's biggest problems is that when it comes to the end, you're left with an A or B type of option, which pretty much means all of your choice making meant absolutely nothing.  Even Before the Storm, though it was slightly more opened, had to close itself off to connect with the original LiS.

With Heavy Rain, your ending can change depending on different circumstances.  Each character has different ways of developing throughout (specifically the original protagonist), and it feels like your choices have a little more weight.

Until Dawn, that feeling gets pushed up just a bit with the added fact that none of the 8 controlled characters are guaranteed to live throughout the game.  I mean, sure, games have twists and turns and character deaths...but how many games have been made up to this point to where nobody outside of the antagonist(s) is guaranteed to live or die?

On top of that, it was really nice to see how your choices affected personality traits of the controlled character, as well as their relationship with the character they were interacting with.  It really added to the ending, to where characters would talk about each other fondly if you built up good relationships between them...or talk angrily about them if you chose actions such as saving yourself and leaving them to die.

It just made the ending that much more interesting since, unless you beat for beat made the exact same choices, no runthrough was guaranteed the same result.

Detroit then amped that up even more by introducing basically a choice chart: a chart that showed the choices that you made as well as what the result was that you triggered.  Like Until Dawn, none of the three characters were guaranteed to live (in fact in one of the beginning scenarios, it's incredibly easy to make the wrong choice and get the character killed).  But on top of that, it felt like your choices had so much more weight to them.

Again, they led up to really neat endings, while not as intricate as U.D's many MANY different types of endings, still felt like your choices were what really affected the end result.

Really, if Dragon Age refined the choice/consequence system a bit and looked at these games for inspiration, Dragon Age could really be a force to be reckoned with...same with Mass Effect.  Both series have massive potential that was squandered by their 3rd games (most of your choices barely carrying over to Inquisition, M.E giving you a basic A-B-C choice ending).

With Dragon Age: Dread Wolf Rising being announced, I really hope they take a page from some of the more refined choice mechanics out there.

snip

Choice is hideously expensive. That's the main factor preventing it from being built into a lot more things, because at the end of the day, the fundamental calculus is 'if 50%, or 75%, or 80 or 90% of players aren't ever going to see this content because they'll only do one playthrough and this is only achievable by making 5 separate binary either-or choices, is it worth the development time for us when we could use it to polish some other part of the game (or, cynically, 'spend the money on marketing instead and pre-sell a trash fire that we'll fix later'), and the vast majority of the time, it's no.
That's why we get the false choice dichotomies we do, where no matter what you choose it winds up having the same overall outcome with maybe minor cosmetic differences, except for very-end-of-game choices, because there you get all the payoff of 'significant choices!!!!!' without any of the cost of 'most people will never see this content', because all it takes to see that content is a quick reload right before the finale and picking a different color when you're talking to the Starchild dialogue option.
Come to think of it, wow, that 'pick a color' thing would be a fantastic satire of the absolute banality of the nature of most ending choices, since it comes down to 'pick a dialogue option' for the most part, if it wasn't for the fact that it was done entirely earnestly.

But lest it be said that I think we're doomed to never getting meaningful choice in video games, the alternative is designing a significantly shorter game where it's designed to be played multiple times - sure, you're not getting 100+ hours with a single playthrough like you are with most AAA single-player titles, but you're getting 4 or 5 15-20 hour playthroughs, which can see significant changes over the course of play. Very honorable mentions to Age of Decadence and Tyranny for this style of play.
And I mean, that's consistent with how CYOA gamebooks have worked since they first came up with them. You don't really wind up telling very long stories in these, which makes it convenient to do multiple 'playthroughs' of them.

Of course, that's only the case with games that have endogenous stories. Games that aren't trying to tell you a specific story can sometimes - maybe even often - tell you a better story than ones that do, because of the *~power of imagination~*, where you just make up a nice little satisfying story for yourself about what all your empire is doing or whatever ('empire' selected because I often find myself in these scenarios in 4x or Grand Strategy games).

It's not technically a game, but Netflix just released a new interactive episode of Black Mirror called Bandersnatch where you can choose what happens. It was pretty fun/good, so I'd recommend checking it out if you have Netflix.

That's pretty awesome.  They actually released a version of Minecraft: Story Mode as well which still keeps some of the choice making.  I think it's pretty cool that they're getting into that gig.

Although now it makes me wonder how long it'll be before you can use your voice for that interaction, and then I'll brace myself because we'll be basically living Fahrenheit 451.