CYOA (for short) gamebooks, for those who've never heard of them, were a big thing back in the 80's and, to a lesser degree, the early 90's. They were books generally told in second person narrative and split into varying amounts of numbered sections. A set of options at the end of each section would lead to other sections, thereby allowing the reader the ability to choose their own path through the book.

In theory anyway. Quite a few of them were very linear and often offered different options that led, in a round-a-bout sort of way, to the same conclusion. But if you were reading the book for the first time, you wouldn't be aware of this and perhaps would even think that *you* were the one choosing how the book progressed.

It was an ingenious idea and one which led to the publication of several hundreds gamebooks covering a large number of genres (although sword-and-sorcery fantasy tended to be predominant) and lasted for well over a decade until, inevitably, the idea lost its novelty value and gamebooks pretty much died out in the mid-90's.

One problem the gamebooks always had was replay value. Some - (the best of all of them) the Fabled Lands series - had lots of replay value and you could play them a dozen times or more and *still* find things you hadn't seen before. Others you played once (the later Lone Wolf books), saw everything and felt precious little need to play them again as nothing changed between one play and the next. Some books introduced options that allowed you to play the books using different characters (Blood Sword did this to good effect) and others (Lone Wolf and some Fighting Fantasy) gave the player different abilities to choose from which changed certain of the options presented to you. All of these things added replay value but as the books were of a limited size (some very limited), there was only a certain amount of times you could replay them before you had run through every possible combination of options and found yourself playing a game you had already played.

And then the gamebook died. Looking back on it, it was kind of inevitable that it was on the way out. Aside from the Fabled Lands series, there were few gamebooks of any great quality released in the 90's and the long-running series were either running out of steam (Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf) or reusing the same ideas over and over again (Choose Your Own Adventure). Also, there was the advent of computers and the average teenager, the general target audience for such gamebooks, was far more interested in playing the latest graphical extravaganza than reading a book. So farewell to the gamebook…

But then the XYZZY article caught my eye.

It raised a number of interesting ideas, the main one being how easy it would be to write a CYOA gamebook as an IF game. The platform wouldn't matter as whichever one you chose - be it Adrift, Tads, Inform, Hugo, whatever - could handle the format easily enough and would be more than capable of doing whatever you wanted. The only limit to what you could do with a gamebook as an IF game would be your imagination.

Replay value would be an easy thing to fix. In gamebooks, most of the options you are given are static; i.e. they don't change from one playing to the next. You could to a steel door while you're playing one time and you might, say, be given three options: 'smash the door down - turn to xx', 'try to open it - turn to xx' or 'knock on the door - turn to xx'. Play the book again and arrive at the steel door and options will be exactly the same.

Admittedly there were ways to vary things even in the gamebooks of old. The option of smashing the door down might lead you to a dice roll to determine whether you're strong enough to smash it down or too weak to manage it. The opening the door option would ask if you had a key. Knocking on the door might produce someone who opened it, or maybe nothing would happen at all. Of course, you could have more options than that: 'listen at the door - turn to xx', 'use an item to open the door - turn to xx', 'set fire to the door - turn to xx' and other options besides. But, as gamebooks were of a limited size, the range of options presented was generally limited to the bare minimum. While it might seem like a good idea to have seventy-five sections devoted to various ways of getting the player past a locked door, the player isn't going to be especially impressed if you've just wasted a quarter of the book on just that one scene.

Interactive Fiction has no limits. Or, to put it more accurately, it *does* but those limits are so vast that it's unlikely in the extreme anyone would ever run into them. The largest novel ever written could be converted to a regular IF game and not come anywhere near the limits of even the most humble system, and as anyone who has played a gamebook can attest few gamebooks could compare size-wise with large novels. Most were little over a hundred and fifty pages and few hit two hundred and fifty. The majority were a lot smaller.

So while those seventy-five sections devoted to opening a door might have been impossible to have in a gamebook (without swelling the size of said gamebook to a page count in the thousands), in an IF game it would be a simple case of putting in as many options as you wanted. To hell with the size requirements. And while seventy-five sections for opening a door is overkill in anyone's book, there's absolutely nothing to stop anyone doing it if they were so inclined.

Another advantage IF has over the standard gamebook format is in allowing for greater amounts of replaying. As said before, gamebooks were very static. Nothing changed from one playing to the next and while differing abilities and powers and characters could add replay value, as the gamebooks themselves were of a limited size, there was only so much that could be done in them before you were playing the same game over and over again.

Not so with IF. One great thing about IF is the use of variables to randomise the way games play. Say, for example, you're playing a gamebook and you come to a bridge over a gorge. You're given the option of either crossing the bridge or not crossing it. You choose to cross it. Several things could happen here - you might fall off the bridge, you might cross it safely, you might decide to turn back. Other things *could* happen but, with the size of gamebooks being limited, they probably won't.

In IF, you could have dozens of different options. You could assign skills to the player. He might be particularly agile so when the bridge sways to one side, he has a 2 in 6 chance of remaining on it. He might get attacked by a giant eagle partway across and by using the system's inbuilt combat system could fend off said eagle. There might be a point in the middle of the bridge where a random event could sweep him off into space or just buffet him about a little. The possibilities are pretty much endless. With enough time and effort, the player could cross the bridge a couple dozen times and have a different experience each time.

And then we come to cheating.

Yep, cheating was a major problem in gamebooks. The best example I can think of is the use of the combat system that most of the gamebooks employed. You, the player, faced one or more enemies. You struck a blow, he (or they) struck a blow back at you. You roll your dice and see what the outcome of the combat is. If you win, you turn to xx. If you die, you turn to xx and start over again. Only the slight problem with this is, of course, that if the player doesn't want to turn to xx and start over again, he doesn't have to. If he loses the fight and then decides to take the winning option, there's nothing that can be done about it. The option has to be displayed in case the player wins the fight and it is still displayed even if he loses so anyone not bothered by a bit of cheating every now and then could take the winning option every time and not concern themselves over turning to xx and starting again.

Another example (and one no doubt familiar to anyone who has ever played a gamebook) is that crucial time in a gamebook when you are asked if you have such-and-such an item. If you do, turn to xx. If you don't, turn to xx and lose the gamebook and fail miserably knowing that you haven't got anywhere. Assuming everyone plays by the rules, there's no problem with this kind of thing. But how often is it that you come to a door you know you need to open to reach the end of the book and, darnit, you only went and picked the magic sword instead of the key? Oh well, not to worry. You've got the option in front of you to open the door even though you *haven't* got the key. Just take it and head through the door. Everyone probably did it at least once. I know I did. And a lot more than once.

Both of those scenarios, and many others besides, could be countered in IF. With combat handled by the system (the player perhaps makes decisions from time to time about how they want to fight), no option would be conveniently displayed for any would-be cheaters to choose so if they didn't win the fight fair and square, they'd be back to the start of the game whether they liked it or not. Likewise the door idea. If you don't have that key you need, you won't be getting through that door no matter how you try and cheat. Sorry. Just not going to happen.

Considering all the above, it's easy to see (ridiculously easy in fact) that a gamebook in IF format would be in every respects superior to anything in actual book format.

So - and the $64,000 pops up - why has no one ever written one?* IF takes away the size restrictions that gamebooks in the past has, it allows for vast amount of possible options (whereas before you were limited by how many sections could fit inside the gamebook), it allows for random happenings… The possibilities, as they say, are endless. Someone could write a gamebook that spanned thousands of page and took literally months to wade through. Or they could write an old-style book. Maybe even *rewrite* an old gamebook and bring it up to date. Most of the gamebooks that I played, even the best ones, had parts that could be improved upon and several (particularly Fighting Fantasy) seemed to have large chunks of them cut so they would make a certain size. Rewritten as an IF game, they could be improved and enlarged.

So why has no one ever written one?


* Of course, I'm not saying there *aren't* IF gamebooks out there (it stands to reason that there must be a few lurking around the dark corners of the Internet somewhere) but there certainly aren't any that have come to any kind of prominence. I haven't come across any myself and I don't know anyone else who has.