Gamebook

Gamebook is a form of printed fiction that lets its reader take part in the story by choosing between different narrative paths, usually navigated through numbered paragraphs or pages rather than read straight through from beginning to end. The form ranges from lightly branching stories close to ordinary fiction at one end to solitaire role-playing adventures at the other, complete with dice rolls, character statistics and equipment, and gamebooks are typically written in the second person so the reader experiences the story as its protagonist. The American series Choose Your Own Adventure, launched in 1979 with The Cave of Time, was the first commercially successful gamebook series and was eventually translated into more than twenty five languages, while the British series Fighting Fantasy, beginning in 1982 with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, built its own tradition with heavier role-playing game mechanics and popularized the format across Britain and elsewhere. Earlier branching-narrative experiments include the 1930 work Consider the Consequences! and branching-path fiction by Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940s, and after a commercial decline in the 1990s the format has found new life on digital platforms.