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

Choose Your Own Idiot-Proofing

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

I’ve been reading more choice fiction lately, and one thing I noticed in the last two books I started (Fifty Shades of Plaid by Parody Brothers, Kindle Unlimited 2014 and How to Be Bad by Michael La Ronn, ePub 2014) was the idiot-proofing. It has moved beyond the usual blurb at the beginning telling you how to read a CYOA, to an entire page after every choice warning you that if you can see this, you forgot to make a choice. Apparently the temptation to flip pages in an eReader is irresistible, at least when compared to the minor price in wasted bits backstopping all your choices. Maybe I’ll add a per-passage warning option to PrePub