As a child of the 80’s, I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books.You know the series of books where you choose the main character’s path at pivotal moments of the story. The way I worked my way through them was to follow one full path without cheating until I died, I would then, retrace my steps and figure out where I made my fatal move. The beauty of the book was that once it was over, you could go back and try it again. The book had a far longer half life than a static linear one. Plus you had the excitement of controlling the story.

Flowchart of Journey Under the Sea

Michael Niggel, an information designer from Vermont, has taken it upon himself to create a flowchart to Choose Your Own Adventure #2: Journey Under the Sea. Using the data from the flowchart, Michael was able to create some graphs. The conclusion is that you will most likely conclude with an unfavorable resolution. One interesting deduction from the information is that there are just as many favorable endings as fatal ones, yet you have a much, much higher chance of arriving at the latter. While visually, this is very interesting to look at, it kind of takes the romance out of the fantasy. Download the PDF here.

Choose Your Own Adventure Chart Info

Choose Your Own Adventure Chart Info

Tags: 1980s, books, information design, visualization

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.