Episode 5: Choose Your Own Adventure

Emerson:
On this episode of Pop and Play, Haeny and my dad discussed Choose Your Own Adventure books, and they finally talk to some real experts. Kids, instead of reading one story from beginning to end, Choose Your Own Adventure books have a branching narrative and many different endings. While Choose Your Own Adventure books are new to us, Haeny and Nathan used to read these books when they were kids, which was like a long time ago.

Nathan Holbert:
Hey, it wasn't that long ago.

Emerson:
You're not fooling anybody.

Nathan Holbert:
In any case. Haeny and I do get a bit nostalgic, and we reflect with our excellent guests on what it means for each of us to play with stories.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. So good to have everybody on our next episode of Pop and Play, where we look at Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Nathan Holbert:
Pop and Play!

Haeny Yoon:
Woo! And part of us wanting to do this, I think it's actually two different reasons. So one of them was about childhood nostalgia, because I feel like we've basically spent this season going into our childhood nostalgia and doing all the things that we want to revisit about what we miss about childhood. And I think the second reason is to continue the theme of this season, which is, what are the flexible boundaries that we have around play? What's structured? What's unstructured? And we came across this as a text where it goes in both directions. There's a structure to it and a way that you're supposed to play or read it, but there's also an unstructured instance to it, because you can choose your own adventure. You have a little bit of agency in what you do. And so I want to go out on a limb and say back in the '80s, '90s, whenever choose your own adventures came onto the scene, it was different for its time, right? Or maybe it was-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Indicative of the time, because I also remember... Do you remember those five minute mystery things, like Encyclopedia Brown and stuff?

Nathan Holbert:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

Haeny Yoon:
Where I feel like everything was a lot about, maybe tricking you into reading, but then also giving you some agency in that. I don't know.

Nathan Holbert:
I think that's right. So maybe I'll take a step back and just give a brief description of what a Choose Your Own Adventure book is.

Haeny Yoon:
Sounds great.

Nathan Holbert:
And then I think we can connect to that particular point. So for those of you who aren't familiar, for those of you who are not of a certain age, Choose Your Own Adventure books were these relatively smallish books that pretty quickly, within two or three pages, you would read some texts, for example, one of the ones that we read was about being in space. And so the first couple pages tell you, ah, you're born on this spaceship and you're out in the middle of the deep galaxies or whatever. And now if you choose to try to fly to this planet, go to page seven. And if you choose to fly to this planet, go to page 28, or whatever. So at the end of one or two pages, it gives you a choice. What do you want to do next? And then you flip over to that page and the story continues based upon that choice you made. And eventually you might make a choice that something catastrophic happens and it says, the end.
To your point about Encyclopedia Brown and other books like that, each story's quite short. You can get through one story in a matter of minutes. I was reading one of these books recently for this particular episode, and I think I got to the end of the first story within maybe three minutes. I died quickly.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. But do you feel like it was the content of the books that you liked or was it the gimmick of it?

Nathan Holbert:
I think a little bit of both. Some of these books were really weird, and the kinds of adventures are not like the kinds of things that I had read in other books before. And so certainly the content themselves was fun and fantastical, but definitely the gimmick was great.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about this thing that Lalitha read about the promise of free will. And as I was reading it this time, as an adult and not as a child, I realized that I did not actually pay attention a lot to the content of it. It was more about flipping the pages and deciding where to go. But there was something about thinking that I was in control of the narrative-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
When really you weren't actually.

Nathan Holbert:
No.

Haeny Yoon:
It is the whole dilemma of free will, or do we have a choice, or are we just moving to the tune of somebody's drum? But it's that promise or the thinking that you actually chose your own adventure that is very freeing as a child.

Nathan Holbert:
One thing I was thinking about when I was doing this is, both the new and the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, they position you as the character, which is necessary, if you're supposedly making these decisions, it has to be you that's making the decisions. Which is different than, even a lot of video games where you take on the role of someone else. Here, we are the character. And in the new one, in the comic book version of this, one of the ways they deal with that is by, the pictures are all a first person perspective. So you're always seeing out of the eyes of the character, as opposed to some sort of a third person view, except for when you die. When you die, you generally see yourself, the character being killed in some form or other. But I don't know, I think that's pretty interesting, and that choice that they're making to try to put you in the position of the character to say, "I."

Haeny Yoon:
Because didn't you think that a lot of this, reading in retrospect, is like video games and role playing games?

Nathan Holbert:
For sure.

Haeny Yoon:
It's nothing now, because there's so many interactive ways to engage with "text", whether it's books or video games or something online or digital. And back then, that was not as common.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Because I think even back then, video games were not necessarily, you playing a role and taking up making choices. It was just like you ate a whole bunch of dots and were Pacman, or something.

Nathan Holbert:
Probably. I definitely think I was drawn to these books in part because of their game-like qualities, and I was very much into video games. So I think there was this interactivity to it that I really was drawn to. I think the idea of being able to make decisions in the story to see how what would unfold was really also a big draw to me. I will say, I'm clicking through with their website right now though, and I don't remember a lot of these books. And maybe there was a couple companies that made these, perhaps. I don't remember the one, for example, War With the Evil Power Master. That's really incredible title for a book. We need to check that one out.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my God.

Nathan Holbert:
But yeah, they were covering a lot of different territory, a lot of different kinds of adventures that we'd go on. But I definitely read every single one that was available to me. I read all the ones that we had in the library. And I think I remember even requesting the librarian get some more, because we needed more of these books. But for me, it's very tied to a particular time in my life where I was reading either Choose Your Own Adventure books or the Hardy Boys. Those are the two kinds of books that I would read. And similarly, Hardy Boys is a mystery. So maybe there is something about this mystery quality to these books that connected them to-

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. You know what I was just thinking? There's something about series that also draw me into it, because there's another part to it, which is what I think about myself as a TV viewer now, is I don't like movies that much, I like series. I like episode one, and then I like there to be ten more episodes.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. You want the story to keep going.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. So there's something about that, that I was really drawn to.

Nathan Holbert:
Well, and these books essentially are that, right? One book is a self-contained series. This one has 28 endings, it turns out, to choose from. So you're going to get all these different endings. So yeah, that makes sense. And I'm similar, I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi type books, and almost all of those are series'. You start one and you're going to get another two or three, at least. So there may be something to that.
I asked my son if he would be interested in doing this. I said, "I have this book. I'm curious if you'd want to read it and then maybe talk to me or talk to somebody else about the book." He was like, "Eh, eh, I don't know. Maybe." And then I handed in the book and he started looking at it. And we were sitting at the table together, and he started looking at it, and then he just kept going and he kept reading it. And then he would start flipping the pages and then he'd flip back. So he immediately got the game. And then he's like, "Oh yeah, I'll take a look at it." And so then he put it in his backpack, and then he came home, and I was like, "Hey, did you look at that book anymore?" He's like, "Yeah, it's really good. I'd love to do that."

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, that's so great.

Nathan Holbert:
He immediately got into it. He's a pretty big reader, so he does a lot of reading but the hook worked perfectly for him. So I think you're right, I think there's something about these books, that page flipping, that adventure story, that fact that there's a series of stories that you can encounter, it's a very compelling way to read a book for a young person.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah. So we can't talk about it from a child's perspective. We have nostalgia and memories, and our telling of those memories that color how we think of this book. So next, we're really curious as to how kids experience the book, the interactive qualities of it and all of that. So we're really interested and excited to talk to kids as they experience Choose Your Own Adventure. Let's start with introductions. Shima and Kokoska are twins.

Shima:
One minute difference. I'm older by one minute.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, you're older? You're the older one?

Shima:
By one minute.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, wow.

Kokoska:
And my favorite animal a horse, I'm saving up for that.

Haeny Yoon:
Nice.

Nathan Holbert:
We're also joined by my son, Emerson.

Emerson:
Dad told me it would take ten minutes. I don't really care that it takes longer though.

Nathan Holbert:
Good.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, thanks. And of course, Sahana.

Sahana:
I'm Sahana. I'm nine and a half, nearly three quarters. I act like I'm 11. I don't care. Sometimes I'm thirty, I don't know why.

Nathan Holbert:
Sounds perfect. So if you guys like watching cool new TV shows or cartoons or playing video games or reading new books, that's what we talk about on our podcast.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, Shima's nodding his head.

Nathan Holbert:
Shima's into it.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. He's nodding his head vigorously. Wait, what book are you reading right now?

Shima:
Hardy Boys.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my gosh, Nathan loves that.

Nathan Holbert:
I love it. I love Hardy Boys. Well done.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Oh, you too? Nice. Kokoska says yes. Sahana, do you

Sahana:
My bookcase is stuffed. When I'm bored, I read a book, that is what I do.

Kokoska:
We read way too much, so my dad made a rule that we can't read from ten to five because we don't do any exercise.

Nathan Holbert:
Wow.

Haeny Yoon:
Nice.

Nathan Holbert:
If only we needed that rule in our house. Well, if you guys wouldn't mind, I have a little bit of a game to start us out with. All right. So I made a very short, very short Choose Your Own Adventure. Okay? So I'm going to read to you the first page of our choose your own adventure. And then there's going to be four choices. And since there's four of you, each of you can take one of the choices. And I'll read to you what happened. So here we go. Here's the situation. Here's page one. You wake up Tuesday morning and find that somehow in the middle of the night, you've fallen into the Mushroom Kingdom, home of Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and Toad. In the distance, you see a pipe, a flag, a vine, and a question block. Okay, Kokoska, do you want to go first? Which thing do you want to go to? The pipe, flag, vine, or question block?

Kokoska:
The question block.

Nathan Holbert:
How did I know that would be the first one somebody would choose? All right. The question block. You see a question block in the distance. You know what that means, power ups. You jump as high as you can and punch the block over your head. A huge mushroom appears. Just as you grab it, you feel your legs and your arms begin to stretch. You notice that you can see further than you ever have before as your head raises higher and higher from the ground. You've grown, you're huge. You punch a block of bricks and watch them shatter. You stomp on a slowly approaching turtle. You've grown so large and strong that nothing can stand in your way. You run faster than ever, you leap, and, and, everything goes dark. You've fallen in a hole. Game over.
Sorry. You had a good run for a minute there.

Haeny Yoon:
Wait, tell us why you chose the question block.

Kokoska:
Because it sounded like a mystery.

Shima:
I was about to say the same thing.

Nathan Holbert:
Okay. How did that experience make you feel, Kokoska?

Kokoska:
I was really surprised.

Nathan Holbert:
Yes. Surprise. Excellent. Have you played Mario Brothers before?

Kokoska:
No.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh. Sorry.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. So despite Nathan's efforts to make a game kids would really get into, we realized that only one of the kids, Nathan's own son, had played Super Mario.

Nathan Holbert:
Parenting victory.

Haeny Yoon:
Victory indeed. So later on in the story, Sahana, let me remind you, who was nine going on 11, said a very offensive statement critiquing our childhood favorite.

Sahana:
It didn't make any sense to get a bunch of coins in a pipe.

Nathan Holbert:
Even though the kids struggled to understand the implications of their choices in the Mario game, they had a pretty good idea of the different kinds of choices that they could make in the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and they divided them into two categories.

Emerson:
Tried to choose good decisions when reading it, and sometimes they decide to do bad decisions reading through it.

Shima:
I take the bad ones.

Nathan Holbert:
Because some of you guys were agreeing, and Emerson said sometimes he chooses the bad choice, and you guys were agreeing, "Yeah, sometimes I choose the bad choice." What is the bad choice? How do you know which choice is the good choice?

Emerson:
It's like the crazy ones.

Kokoska:
More dangerous.

Emerson:
Like in the tyrannasauras case, it's the attack one.

Sahana:
I go along with the sensible, responsible operations.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh, okay. So the bad choices are the dangerous choices.

Shima:
Yeah. Like dangerous, crazy and fighting. And also it can be something like maybe you should call emergency, or I instead just choose, I will do it myself.

Haeny Yoon:
I did pick a lot of the ones where I had to do it myself, because I was like, "Eh, forget this."

Nathan Holbert:
So that's a good point. So you guys, sounds like you read it more than once. You read a story and then you went back and you read another story. Is there any other little ways in which you read the book that was maybe different than reading a regular book? Go ahead.

Emerson:
Every page has you choose something and then it keeps on going every page. And there's a bunch of different endings it could be. Unlike another book, which there's only one ending.

Nathan Holbert:
Right. Well, and like Shima said, that at one time he said that he made a choice and he flipped the page and he just saw the words to the end, and so he went right back and he made the different choice. Is that something you guys did? Did anybody else do that?

Emerson:
This one's my favorite ending. So I become a space general of a research project. And it might think it's bad because you are a general, so you'll go in war and apparently die. But they said it's a peaceful country, we are not go in war often. The only war that's happened in our whole history was 1000 million years ago. Actually 1000 million light years ago.

Shima:
Has anyone got to the farthest end?

Sahana:
I have.

Shima:
You have? What is it?

Sahana:
Wait, the last page ending, right?

Shima:
Yeah.

Sahana:
Your whole spaceship explodes with a circuit overload.

Emerson:
I sneaked one of the pages and it said, you went back in time, restart from the beginning.

Sahana:
Those are horrible.

Kokoska:
What's different with other books is that these stories that can be really short are really long.

Haeny Yoon:
Did anybody try to make it as long as possible? Was that a goal that some people had while reading?

Emerson:
I got pretty far on one of them. I mean like, there's like three pages left of...
I lasted at least a hour. Do you want to know how I lasted a hour?

Haeny Yoon:
One hour?

Emerson:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Really?

Emerson:
I went back, I ended up in the one that you start over and then I kept going to that one and then I lasted an hour. But in the end I went to a different page by accident and then I finally succeed.

Haeny Yoon:
Boom. I mean, I remember doing that as a kid. I would always try to make the longest possible experience that I could. Sahana, you were shaking your head, no, when I said that. I tried to make the longest ending possible. Did you not want to do that?

Sahana:
If it was a long ending and it was good, then fine. For as long as it's a good ending, I don't care, but I try to make it as short as possible because in this one, I only got up to page 22.

Nathan Holbert:
So I have a question. We were talking earlier that you guys read this book differently than you read other books. And I'm curious about how you feel about that. I mean, is this just a different fun book experience? Do you prefer this to reading books that are straightforward? Kokoska?

Kokoska:
I like comics, graphic novels, normal books, actually Choose Your Own Adventure might be third. And then normal books is fourth.

Nathan Holbert:
I want to hear your thinking Sahana.

Sahana:
It's very hard, right? Because it's a little bit like you don't know what's coming next, in another book it's more straightforward. But if you don't like straightforward stuff and you just want to go along with, if you just want to make choices, then I guess you would like Choose Your Own Adventure more. Though sometimes I like other novels because you know exactly what they're about. Only Choose Your Own Adventures, give you this one big topic. They don't really explain what's going to be inside of it. Otherwise the blur would be the whole book. The title would be the whole book. This is about a girl and something, blah, blah blah.

Nathan Holbert:
So Haeny, we just got done talking to four super delightful kids about these books that you and I remember very distinctly from our childhood. How did you feel about seeing that reflected through these kids and their experiences with these books?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I mean, other than Sahana poo pooing super Mario brothers, I did feel like I was actually felt very validated that they liked it. I don't know if I wasn't surprised necessarily because I think reading is not just about words on a text, right? It's an embodied experience, right? And so I think Choose Your Own Adventure is almost like a game and you run back and forth through different scenarios. And so I felt validated that they enjoyed it and it was actually really surreal to watch kids that were around our age when we were reading them, go through the process of it.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. That's totally true. And also to hear how similar, the way in which they experienced it was, right. They talked a lot about, oh, I'm going to choose all the bad choices and see what happens or, I'm going to flip to the end and see one of the pictures that looks like an ending that looks interesting and then try to figure out how to get there by going backwards. I mean, that's something I definitely did when I read them. So to see them do that too was really cool.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Okay. Well, how did it feel to have Emerson read it with you?

Nathan Holbert:
There is something interesting about this though. Giving kids something from your childhood and seeing how they react to it. I mean that is in many ways, the game of being a parent, you're constantly trying to bring stuff you care about, stuff you're interested in to these new humans. It's a constant swinging door between them being so into it. And then you getting to share that joy with them. And then the other side of them being like, this is dumb, please don't ever do this again. And you just being so heartbroken.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
It's just the day in the life of a parent, I think.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
The last thing we want to do, we're a little bit over time. So we'll do this quickly. But the last thing we want to do is something that we call, What's Popping. And What's Popping is like, what's cool. What's fun. What are you into right now? And so what we'll do is we'll go around the group and each person can just say something, a piece of media. So like a movie or a book or a comic or a game that you're playing and that you're really into and tell us a little bit about it. And then we'll all learn something new. We'll learn some new cool thing that we should check out. Okay. Emerson, what's popping?

Emerson:
Book, Harry Potter, movie, Harry Potter. I still need to watch the fifth and sixth movie, but can't watch it next to my sister. Since she still haven't finished the fourth book, she just started it. And plus she's not actually ready anyway. So, but, and yeah, I'm playing a video game right now.

Nathan Holbert:
What video game are you playing?

Emerson:
It's like a paper Mario game.

Nathan Holbert:
Paper Mario. So paper Mario's popping Harry Potter's popping. All right. Kokoska, what's popping for you?

Kokoska:
I'm reading Hardy boys and I'm watching Harry Potter.

Nathan Holbert:
I loved the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay. Shima, go ahead.

Shima:
The books I'm reading right now is the Hardy Boys. And my favorite so far is The Tower Treasure. And actually The Flying Express. No, The Secret Panel is number one. And I want to watch Harry Potter number five. Yeah. Five.

Nathan Holbert:
Those all sound fun. Excellent. Sahana. What are you into right now?

Sahana:
Into Art. Art, art, avocados. Which is why I have to be excused.

Nathan Holbert:
We'd like to thank our special guests this week. Emerson, Shima, Kokoska and Sahana. Special thanks to Emerson and Maisie for putting up with their father and for their fantastic openings and closings of this episode.

Haeny Yoon:
That was a good time. Here's wishing all our listeners adventures of their own choosing, full of mystery games and art and avocados. Pop and play is produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha Vasudevan and Joe Riina-Ferrie at Teachers College, Columbia University with the Digital Futures Institute.

Nathan Holbert:
This episode was edited by Jen Lee, Billy Collins, and Lucius Von Joo. For a transcript, and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay.

Haeny Yoon:
This episode was produced by Lucius Von Joo.

Nathan Holbert:
Our music is selections from Leafeater by Paddington Bear used here under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time.