It is a truth universally acknowledged that anything popular among children in the '80s will have been reinvented in the 2000s with snarking and loving attention. There have been a good number of cynical, heavily referential CYOAs-for-adults made since the early aughts (I'm hardly innocent on this count.) I'm going to cover two female-targeted relationshippy books and one male-targeted apocalyptic action-comedy.

People who grow up with a genre or medium before taking it up themselves will, inevitably, have rather different ideas about the strengths and uses of the form than the first generation of creators. It's also worth bearing in mind that, although all the books below adopt a catchy series title that identifies them as CYOA, none form part of an extensive series.
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The Cave of Time was among the most beloved of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but it wasn't enormously typical of the series. R.A. Montgomery (who I should look at separately at some point) in particular seems to have prefered more linear, constrained plots with lots of no-choice jumps. Part of this might have been the natural shape of divergence: Sugarcane Island and The Cave of Time are such strong examples of their type of CYOA that there wasn't much room for variation in that direction. Still, the company seems to have developed and abided by a structural house style, as it did with tone, content and motifs like the Cave.
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A key figure in the theory of cartography, and of information-representing systems in general, is the Bellman's map in The Hunting of the Snark:

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. "What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs! "Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank:" (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-- A perfect and absolute blank!"

The Bellman's map, the simplest map possible, is not a map at all, and this tells us something important about maps. The CYOA equivalent would be a diagram of a single node: a normal prose story.

Picture a slightly more complicated diagram: a blank sheet with two dots on it, one labelled "Vbrtz" and the other "Skwrf", but otherwise featureless. This does slightly more map-like things than the Bellman's map: it asserts that these two things exist, that they are named and that they stand in some relation to each other, but nothing else. We don't know the scale or the orientation, we don't know what kind of thing a dot represents, we've no idea whether the space is physical or abstract. It's still not a map. The CYOA version of this would be a string of beads: an unbroken series of no-choice jumps, equivalent to conventional prose but experienced somewhat differently.
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When something appeals to children, it's only a matter of time before someone tries to appropriate it for educational purposes. A great deal of childrens' CYOA attempts, in a fairly haphazard way, to reinforce moral principles or deliver Educational Facts; much of it promotes curiosity and enthusiasm about its subject matter (almost always science or history). There's a big gap between this kind of treatment and a truly educational work, though.

CYOA can be produced a great deal more easily than most narrative game systems, but it still gives the impression (if not always the reality) that closer reading and information-retention will lead to better outcomes; there are some straightforward reasons, then, why it would seem well-suited for educational fiction. The examples I've found suggest a fundamental mismatch, however.

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IF has always had a rather mixed relationship with CYOA. Part of this, certainly, is about audience expectations: IF's conception, like mainstream CYOA's, lay in storytelling to children. But IF was incubated in a college environment, and since then has been written mainly for people of that age and reading level, with precocious children cheerfully admitted but seldom directly catered to. The overwhelming majority of CYOA has always been for an audience of children and teenagers, it's vastly quicker to produce and to play than IF. It's therefore a common view among IF players -- and not always an entirely unjustified one -- that CYOA is the refuge of writers too lazy for IF.

There's a certain amount of self-fulfilling prophecy to this: because IF authors don't consider CYOA to be a serious genre, they tend to write CYOA that isn't serious. Most IF-derived CYOA is short and silly. But it's also true that lower-investment systems are more likely to attract lower-investment writers; things seem to be kind of overdetermined. But the forms have the shared appeal of text-based interactive narrative, and their nostalgia zones largely coincide.

The general rule in computer text CYOA is that IF-based systems conceal their state-tracking by default, while browser-based systems reveal it by default. Even with revealed states, they present problems for mapping; I haven't tried to map Choice Of Games pieces because they rely so extensively on state-tracking that diagramming them would be impractical (in the style I'm using, at least). Some presentations also make it harder to distinguish between nodes. The concealed states of computer CYOA are powerful tools, but they make analysis harder: the accuracy of these diagrams may be a little more erratic than usual.

Warning: includes discussion of a pornographic game that deals with BDSM and abuse.

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Stateless CYOA is a ready-to-hand kind of medium; playing it is self-explanatory and has a negligible learning curve, and the appeal of influencing the course of a story is instantly understandable to anybody who consumes fiction. Because it's delivered in bite-sized chunks and because of the engagement fostered by even very weak interaction, it may be more easily absorbed than straight prose, particularly by children.
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Eternal Quest. See QUEST, ETERNAL.
...
Quest, Eternal. See ETERNAL QUEST.

-- Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland

CYOA had a quite separate origin from modern RPGs, predating them in terms of invention though not as a commercial form. But they were both *cough* asymmetric participatory storytelling in a rule-bounded ludic structure, and once they had become widespread enough to notice each other, some kind of cross-pollination was pretty much inevitable.

Today, I'm going to be looking at three swords-and-sorcery CYOAs that are straightforwardly descended from fantasy RPG. Two of them are solo quests involving heavy state-tracking via a character sheet; these are what I think of as 'gamebooks'. The third lacks character sheets, following a standard CYOA approach while attempting to emulate a classic RPG party.
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Nothing quite so entertaining this time around, I'm afraid; just a couple more Edward Packard books, selected for their potentially-oddball status.

(As per request, I'm including clickthroughs to larger versions of the structure diagrams, and I'm phasing out the light-orange leadup pages.)

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Choose Your Own Adventure books (the series, not the medium) usually had the same kind of hero: a white American pre-teen, somewhat gender-ambiguous but tending towards male-default, engaged upon some variant of a Boy's Adventure. This wasn't totally inflexible — the age range varied quite a lot, and there were girl leads both in male roles (Deadwood City) and more female-oriented, female-authored books (The Magic of the Unicorn). They never really ventured into the more perilous territory of teen fiction or romance, though; often you'd find yourself with a girl sidekick who you could imagine as sort of being your girlfriend, but that was about it.

Other people have tried it, though. In this post I'm going to be looking at a couple of books by non-Choose Your Own Adventure writers, aimed at a somewhat older, female audience and published in the mid-2000s. (Wanders inevitably into gender discussion, including rape.)
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I've been thinking a fair bit about CYOA structure and its effects, and I thought it'd be useful to plot out some structures of existing works. It was just going to be some diagrams and a few notes, but it quickly became apparent that I wanted to say a lot more than would fit into that format, so I'm splitting it up.

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Jacqueline's Indigo New Language SpeedIF challenged authors to write games in IF (in the broadest sense) languages that they had not worked in before; I went with Undum, a relatively easily-learned Javascript-based system for writing CYOA-style, browser-friendly fiction. Undum games are likely to be a lot more accessible than full-on IF to a non-IF audience; to remedy this failing, I wrote a Stiffy Makane game (does this count as fanfic? I am confused), which means that

• it relies on you having played the previous Stiffy games,


• it's thoroughly obscene, yet lacks the virtue of actually functioning as porn. Jacqueline describes it as 'scary and depraved,' and I cannot gainsay this,


• much of it is made up of cheap shots at things that only IF insiders and CYOA enthusiasts will recognise.

Nonetheless, I amused myself immensely in writing it, and hopefully one or two other people will be amused too: The Cavity of Time. And I'd certainly use Undum again, albeit in something rather more carefully considered.