Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? The ones where on many of the pages there are several choices, like "If you enter the cave, turn to page 27. Otherwise, turn to page 31", so the story has multiple paths and endings? Well Christian Swinehart sure does, and he's created an interesting and beautiful way of representing paths through the books as a series of color-coded "pages". White pages are decision pages, colored pages are endings (from red:bad endings, to blue:good endings), and the grey lines are story pages with no decisions. Sorting the pages by type, and then sorting the books by year, shows an interesting progression on how the books changed over the years, perhaps driven by market forces to provide more story and fewer choices.
There's even an interactive story you can play yourself, Zork: The Cavern of Doom. As you read through the story and make your choices, your path through the book is displayed in a visual "storyline", using the same color coding above. Here's my path through the story (click to enlarge):
As you can see, I died a few times (landing on the "bad ending" pages), but as shown by the lower loops you can trace back and try for a different ending.
Samizdat Drafting Co.: CYOA
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