Whichever I Choose, It Amounts to the Same

The adventure I'm currently playing is proving something of a slog, so to keep the blog ticking over, here are some tangential musings I've been intermittently working on this year.

A while back I found a post at the Gamebook Reviews blog which got me thinking about 'unlosable' gamebooks. I made a comment there, but subsequently it occurred to me to post something on the topic here because:

1. I thought of more to say.
2. Not that many people were likely to read a comment made on a blog post that was already months old.

In case anyone is unclear on what I mean by 'unlosable', this is nothing to do with gamebooks like Starship Traveller and the Virtual Reality Adventures series, where you can be certain of succeeding at the adventure so long as you take the correct route through the book. I'm talking about gamebooks that don't have any 'fail endings'.

There are different types of gamebook that fit into this category. For now I'm focusing on the books which only have one ending and one basic plot, which unfolds more or less the same way regardless of the decisions you make (though I do intend to waffle on about the other sort at a later date). 

The most basic examples of this would be the 'CYOA for toddlers' series Your First Adventure, a set of optimistically fatalistic micro-adventures with just one decision, both choices leading to the same favourable outcome. I'm too far removed from the mindset of pre-preschoolers to have any idea what sort of appeal such books would have to the target audience, but so much is said about young children's love of repetition, it wouldn't surprise me if most tots exposed to these books preferred making the same decision every time. Which, let's be honest, is good practice for a lot of the more 'one true path' gamebooks for older readers.

Today's youngsters may have encountered David Glover's Maths Quest gamebooks. Practically every decision in these is not a choice in the normal gamebook sense: instead, the reader is presented with a mathematical problem and a small selection of possible answers. Pick the correct answer, and you progress to the next stage of the adventure. Get it wrong, and there's trouble afoot. It's not the first time such a formula has been tried - the Be An Interplanetary Spy series had a bit more variety in the types of puzzle used, but essentially worked the same way. Except that in BAIS, getting it wrong usually meant death or some other form of failure. MQ, by contrast, hints at some terrible fate that is about to befall you, but then averts the threatened doom, usually via the intervention of the book's designated mystery sidekick. It's like Bullseye's evil twin - "Come and have a look at how you would have died."

There was a subsequent series of Maths Quest books by different authors, and similar books released under the History Quest and Science Quest banners, which went a step further. Pick a wrong answer, and the book just tells you why you didn't get it right, and sends you back to the question to try again. Not even a narrow escape, making these books rather less 'thrilling' than their blurbs assert them to be.

An earlier series of gamebooks that worked similarly to Maths/History/Science Quest was Martin Waddell's The Mystery Squad. Decisions were mostly puzzle-based, and getting a wrong answer led to your being told you were wrong (and often pelted with custard pies for your foolishness) and sent back to the puzzle section for another try. Still, those books did require the reader to keep track of how many times they got pied, and used that figure to rate the reader's performance at the end, so there were at least consequences to making mistakes in those books.

Much the same kind of rating system (using red herrings rather than custard pies) features in Mary Danby's The Famous Five and You books. It's a long time since I read any of the Enid Blyton books on which they're based, but the point (such as it is) of the gamebook adaptations appears to be to reproduce the original narrative as closely as possible. The first decision in the first book regards whether the children should travel by train or by car, and if you don't pick the 'right' one (determined, as far as I can tell, by what happened in Five on a Treasure Island), you get a redirect and a red herring. These books (yes, plural - there were apparently half a dozen of the things) aren't about finding new takes on 'classic' children's adventure stories, they're disguised trivia quizzes based for the most part on dull minutiae. I think I may have a new least favourite gamebook series here.

A not-so-obvious variant is Harry Harrison's misleadingly-named You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat. Play it once, and it's a moderately entertaining adventure in which you're a rookie in the Special Corps, sent to a prison planet to find a certain mad scientist. Play it again, and you soon discover that the decisions you make are meaningless. For instance, at one point you get to take one of three weapons with you. Immediately afterwards, you encounter an opponent against whom the weapon you chose is of no use. The nature of that opponent varies depending on which weapon you picked, but the plot beat is always the same: you chose 'poorly', and get robbed as a consequence of not having selected the 'right' weapon. 

Almost every fork in the narrative is like this. Faced with a binary choice, one option leading to success, the other to disaster, your selection always takes you to the outcome the author has already chosen. And it's not just decisions. Flip a coin (renamed an amphisibenic bipolar determinator in the text because jargon) to determine who wins a contest - the result for heads is identical to that for tails. When captured by the Star Beast, your freedom depending on how well you answer its riddles, wrong answers leave you no worse off than correct ones.

There are a couple of sort-of exceptions, where picking one option leads to being told something like, 'No, doing that would be stupid and doom you. Go back and choose the alternative course of action, you idiot,' but that's not exactly an improvement. The book's interactivity is illusory, and the decisions you make are irrelevant.

Most of the Back to the Future mini-gamebooks given away with breakfast cereal in the mid-1980s are similarly railroady. Follow the course of events that played out in the film, or don't - you end up in the same place regardless. Except for in the second and sixth 'books' in the series.

I only ever read book 2 once, decades ago, so I don't remember it clearly, but I do know that it makes it possible to avoid causing the paradox on which the movie's plot hinges, at which point the gamebook narrative rather fizzles out because the author didn't have the space to develop the concept. Book 6 has more diversity of outcomes, but in the end they all boil down to either a variant of what happened on screen, or words to the effect of, 'Oh well, you have a time machine. Better go back to the start and try again.' Obviously there are limits to how much you can do for a cereal packet freebie, but there are other examples that provided more challenging adventures over breakfast. 

Three Men in a Maze, published as part of the Tracker Books series, is a slightly different sort of interactive adaptation of a novel, based on an anecdote from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. As a textual simulation of what it's like to get lost in Hampton Court Maze under the guidance of a buffoon who thinks he's a lot smarter than he is, it's not bad, but you'd probably derive more entertainment from reading the book on which it's based.

I shan't say much about the pseudonymous Jak Shadow's F.E.A.R. Adventures, as I've already played most of them on this blog. Still, they merit a mention here. As in the Glover Maths Quest books, you can make 'bad' decisions, but never actually face the consequences of your 'error'. Instead you get sent back to the start to try again - which I consider a failure, hence my covering them in the blog, but the books themselves shy away from demoralising their readers with that f-word. Instead, they demoralise you by disregarding logic and reality, and punishing sensible decisions, but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

I never really got into Bantam Books' Time Machine series, but given that it lasted for over 20 books, it must have found a decent audience. In any case, at least some of them merit a mention here, though they're a bit of a special case. As I understand it, the point of these books is to find the chain of decisions that leads to the ending, with poor choices causing you to loop back to an earlier point in the narrative. That might make them sound like the F.E.A.R. Adventures, but while F.E.A.R. uses the looping back to cop out of having the viewpoint character come to any harm, Time Machine is more like attempting to navigate a textual maze (only with options more varied than choosing a direction at each junction).

Well, that's how the earlier ones work, at least. Reviews suggest that there are also books in the series where progress towards victory is inevitable regardless of the choices made, and a couple in which it's possible to get trapped in a loop on account of having chosen the wrong item at the outset. So, not every entry in the series is 'unlosable', though the exceptions may be that way owing to authorial or editorial errors rather than a deliberate change from the norm.

Anyway, those (and arguably the Marvel Super Heroes book that helped inspire this post) are all of the 'reach the same victory ending no matter what you do' gamebooks of which I am aware. Readers are welcome to mention any I've missed, correct errors, or just make their views on the subject known. But please don't say anything about 'unlosable' gamebooks with a variety of different plotlines and/or endings, as I'll be covering those in a separate blog entry.