How Choose Your Own Adventure Books Brought Choice To Video Games

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Computer RPGs like Disco Elysium owe a lot to old school text adventures like Zork, classic tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and a non-linear genre of literature called «Gamebooks,» the classic example of which is the Choose Your Own Adventure series. These analog forms of interactive fiction introduced and refined many of the concepts core to modern video game storytelling – branching narrative routes based on player choice, multiple endings, and so on. Early works of interactive fiction like the Choose Your Own Adventure novellas or Steven Jackson's Fighting Fantasy gamebooks also acted as a testing ground of sorts for text adventures and similar video games, teaching game writers how to give players story choices that were meaningful and satisfying.

When computer RPGs like the Elder Scrolls games and MMOs like Ultima Online become successful franchises, there were gamers in the gaming community who speculated titles like these would drive classic tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons out of business. In reality, tabletop gaming as a hobby went though a renaissance around the early 2000s and 2010s thanks to a mixture of good promotion, creative new RPG products, Actual Play livestreams like Critical Role, and game developers embracing the distinct strengths of tabletop roleplaying. A Game Master with good story-writing skills and an invested table of players can improvise stories with theoretically infinite possible choices and narrative outcomes; video game stories, pre-programmed ahead of time, intrinsically have a finite number of player choices and ending scenarios (though recent games like Wildermyth have managed to bypass this technical limitation through procedural narrative