"Choose Your Own Adventure" On Your iPhone 135
If you spent a good portion of your childhood reading the classic "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, you'll be glad to know that you can soon waste countless hours at work turning to random pages on your iPhone. Edward Packard, one of the original authors of the series, has helped create an app called U-Ventures which uses special effects to create a story in the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure format. From the article: "The first U-Venture is a sort of a sequel to a classic title, The Cave of Time. In 'Return to the Cave of Time,' the U-Venture, 'you go back in the cave — you don't have a choice on that,' Packard tells NPR's Neal Conan. But from that point on, the reader chooses her own course."
Oh, really (Score:5, Insightful)
Is anything so simple and trivial that it can be done in basic HTML suddenly news when you can add the words "on the iPhone"? Still, after all these years? It's as if Slashdot has a spam filter that is automatically bypassed by the phrase.
does it have a point in this medium? (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing that made choose-your-own-adventure books interesting was essentially hacking a limited notion of interactivity into a non-interactive medium, by asking users to manually enact GOTOs. But on a computer, we have interaction sort of built in, so the hack is uninteresting. Sure, you can still do it, and people might still like reading them, but it's not really its own category of thing, and we've had it forever. You can do it with a set of HTML pages linked to each other, or before that, with hypercard pages, and people actually did so, a long time ago [wikipedia.org], and did it more interestingly.
Re:"Her" own course? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Her" own course? (Score:2, Insightful)
'He' has always been considered gender neutral when referring to an arbitrary person. It's just the radical feminist propaganda than has made using the generic 'he' verboten. Look at modern English from 1970 as far back as you care to, and you'll see that this is the way the language works. It's much better than using a plural pronoun just because the generic 'he' may offend someone who will probably also be offended by something other triviality in your message.
I'm torn, here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh, really (Score:4, Insightful)
What's really sad is that Choose Your Own Adventure books have been available ever since the iPhone got the Kindle app. So this isn't even something new to the iPhone.
Re:Oh, really (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just that these new books are for the iPhone, but that it's Edward Packard writing them.
Re:Oh, really (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. Slashdot would never have mentioned it if he did it for any other medium. Ever looked at the Apple section? Of course you have -- you can't block it from the front page (just like Idle). It's just an endless stream of raw advertising sewage. All just to keep Apple relevant, and Slashdot irrelevant.
Re:Choose your adventure (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately real office life isn't nearly as exciting as the books:
Page 50: You deny your manhood. In return you get a foot on the fast track ladder for promotion but you never make it to the top without the right connections or nobby background. On your deathbed you regret that you lived your life as a worm and not a lion.
Page 69: You drop kick your boss and set his desk alight! Reliving the two minute thrill of it gets you through the first week of your seven year jail sentence. Eventually you sink into a downward spiral of self-destructive behaviour.