Choose Your Own Adventure Books

(This description has been taken directly from the Humboldt University website, simply because the format was so obnoxious to my own eyes that I couldn't in good conscience send anybody else there. I hope the Copyright Gods will except the link and explanation on this page in exchange for my copying the text.)

The Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book series started in 1979 when Random House hired author Edward Packard to write a new kind of children's novel in which the reader could participate in conducting the narrative. The first book in the series, The Cave of Time, possessed forty different endings and numerous paths to get there by giving the reader the choice of what the character could do next. The idea was that a young reader could read the book more than once, and end up with a completely different story. The books became extremely popular among grammar school students throughout the 1980s.

The series lasted through 184 different novels and passed through a couple of different publishers. In 1998,the series was discontinued. However, today there are many clones of the original CYOA.

The Star Wars and Pokemon franchises now have books that follow the same model. For adults, there have been Choose Your Own Romance, and Choose Your Own Erotica, books published in some European countries. There are also interactive websites in which you can write the next steps to an ongoing adventure story. In addition, Japan has recently developed some DVD movies in which the viewer can choose his or her own adventure.

What is a Choose Your Own Adventure Story?

Although you may not have come across any books that fall into the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) genre, there is no question of their proliferation in the book scene. So what are CYOA books? This genre is classified as a novel that allows readers to determine the course of the novel. The novel begins in one place and then allows students to choose different paths for the characters to travel.

Whether or not we realize, choosing our own adventures is something that we do every day. When we walk down the street and choose to turn left instead of right, in essence, we are choosing our own adventure. Making this genre relevant to students is not something that should be too difficult. In addition, there are a number of ways in which teachers can incorporate CYOA themes in the classroom.