13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project. all told i ended up cataloging a dozen books from the early-to-mid 80s, looking for patterns in their construction and in the paths made by different readers through them.
these short, simple books had a surprisingly complicated structure with their interlocking pages & choices. as a kid the idea of writing one and keeping all those pages straight boggled my mind. what was lost on me at the time was that even a list of hundreds of page numbers can be comprehensible if it’s redrawn as a diagram. these days i feel like i approach everything that way.
so here is my look back at an obsession from my past, using graphical obsessions of the present to guide the way.
