Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 172)

Trigger Happy
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composed of only nine short chapters; at the end of
each chapter (except the last), the reader will be offered
a choice of eight different directions in which the story
might go. That sounds pretty simple. Eight, nine—
they’re pretty small numbers. Unfortunately, if each
possible plotline is to be truly independent of all the
others, the number of chapters required by such a
scheme is eight to the power of eight, or sixteen
million, seven hundred and seventy thousand, two
hundred and sixteen. Show me a writer who wants to
work that hard and I’ll choke on my Martini.
If you begin to adulterate this hyper-purist concept,
though, and allow the different story paths to cross each
other or converge, so that they can “share” chapters
with each other, the numbers do get more manageable.
But that in turn throws up its own unique storytelling
problems. And they have already been encountered in
prose writing. As noted earlier, the popularity of the ZX
Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers in the early
1980s coincided with the rise of the Fighting Fantasy
gamebooks by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, as
well as the American Choose Your Own Adventure
series (by various authors).
Each numbered story nugget of a few hundred
words ended with something between two and four