Choose Your Own Adventure (January 22, 2005)

[KrisV]

We recently came across what appears to be a Wing Commander themed College project. It aimed to create a Choose Your Own Adventure game dubbed Wing Your Own Commander:

Choose Your Own Adventure is a subset of the fiction genre of books. CYOA reads like any ‘normal’ story, save for one extreme difference. At pivotal points throughout the book, readers are asked to choose amongst a set of decisions which will then impact how the rest of the story plays out. Due to the many different combinations of options, the books contain an enormous amount of longevity. The genre began as early as 1979, with the publication of “Choose Your Own Adventure #1 – The Cave of Time”. Skylark Publishers, now defunct, released over a decades worth of CYOA books, thus creating the blueprint for how the genre should be done. (http://www.gamebooks.org/cyoajr.htm) CYOA books continue to enjoy great success in today’s market.

There hasn't been much progress recently, but it's a very interesting read if you're into the CYOA scene.

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Original update published on January 22, 2005

 

[criticalmass]

Sorry to pick up this old bit of news, but since it's concerning CYOA/IF I coudn't resist: From what I glean from the website this was an assignment for a play theory class - therefore the strange structure, and the somewhat labored approach to designing a variant of a WC MMORPG based on interactive fiction.

And that's where the buck stops - because WYOC was obviously never meant to lift off, it was just a theoretical design in achieving an online community game based on Wing Commander and certain theories concerning play.
Nonetheless, play theory is a very worthwhile subject - and reading the texts on the site from that angle may shed some light on your own style and motivations for playing, and especially playing around in the WC universe.