m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

About a month ago I reviewed a few modern hyperfiction stories from my then-free trial of Kindle Unlimited. I also decided to graph the one children’s book among them, Can You Survive a Global Blackout? (You Choose: You Choose: Doomsday) by Matt Doeden, in which, my assiduous reader may recall, I got shot for “looting” an apparently abandoned bike store.

I was curious about the back buttons at the top of each story passage which at the time seemed to imply a lack of merging paths in the graph of the story, so I graphed the whole story. (I typed the choices by name into Twine and made the graph with DotGraph.) While going through all the paths, I noticed that sometimes there were two or even three back buttons at the top after all, making the graph more traditional than I expected.

The stats I got out of DotGraph (39 nodes, 17 leaves, 42 links, and 1.08 links per node) still didn’t quite add up to the advertised numbers (40 choices and 17 endings), but then “choices” is a bit vague.