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

The Most Boring Books Never Written

This post includes Amazon affiliate links to the book(s) pictured.

I’ve stumbled across more new-to-me hyperfiction in the process of composing an upcoming post about choice mapping, so I thought I’d devote a post to it despite not having read a single one of them yet.

First of all, there’s the first gamebook ever, Consider the Consequences! by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins, published in 1930, about which James Ryan is threatening to write a paper. For now, he has screenshots—I mean, pictures—of the book up on Twitter. Sadly, no copies are currently available at Amazon.

Next up is a series of unrelated choose-your-path books by Rudolf Kerkhoven and Daniel Pitts: The Adventures of Whatley Tupper (2010) The Redemption of Mr. Sturlubok (2011), The Most Boring Book Ever Written (2012) and the finale, Can Stuart Henry Zhang Save the World? (2014). But don’t despair, a sequel of sorts is in the works.

Lastly, I stumbled across a pair of gamified Shakespeare plays by Ryan North, To Be or Not To Be (2013/2016) and Romeo and/or Juliet (2016).

Update

I missed one: Choose Cthulhu is a bilingual project of choosing-your-own eldrich horror. Or, at least, the horror of scrolling down to the bottom of the screen and encountering a link in R'lyehian, the harsh and mind-bending language of the Old Ones, to pag 2. Heaven help us all.