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Writer pens brilliant Choose Your Own (Twitter) Adventure

Should you be old enough to remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, chances are their choice-and-consequences style of storytelling occupies a special place in your heart.

It’s probably also left an itch that not even the most complex of videogame roleplaying game stories can scratch, so much so that you’d be very happy to see a resurgence of Choose Your Own Adventure storytelling in 2015.

Rejoice, then, for a highly creative writer has made brilliant use of Twitter to do exactly that, as reported on Axby Magazine’s blog. He’s not the first – other writers have done similar things on other social networking platforms before – but this one deserves the limelight because it’s just so smartly done.

The story being told is called A Dreadful Start, and to start it off all you have to do is load the profile of a Twitter account called @wnd_go. This is what you’ll see:

You’re presented with a very brief snippet of the story, and two choices that will take you to the next leg… or a grisly end. Naturally.

Twitter’s limit of 140 characters means the story details are sparse, leaving much of the who, what, when and why to your imagination, but there’s no argument from my side that it doesn’t work. Even working with such a limited palette, A Dreadful Start draws the reader in and prompts many clicks of the Back button, in true Choose Your Own Adventure style.

Of course, you’d be right to suspect that there’s a commercial angle lurking unseen here: A Dreadful Start is actually an advertisement for a novel, albeit a very clever and highly creative one put together by a fan. You’ll only find that out if you make it all the way to the end without dying, though.

Axby’s Joe Strange writes that superfan Terence Eden, the man behind the Twitter-based CYOA, has actually documented just what it takes to put something like it together on his own blog, which you can read over here. It’s a lot more complex than you’d imagine, and a great look at what happened behind the scenes to bring the story to life.

[Source – Axby Magazine blog]

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