cyoa (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books.  Not just in the abstract — these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles.

At its atomic level, a cyoa
book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most
pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump
to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the
story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide
these ‘narrative’ and ‘endings’ groups further based on the number of
choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this,
imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages
out next to each other:

In
this example book, page one is a ‘branching’ decision, meaning there
are at least two choices offered to the reader. The second page is a
‘story’ page, meaning that it was either a text page that had a single
forced choice (e.g., ‘To continue, turn to page 30’), or an
illustration page outside of the stream of the story. The brightly
colored pages are endings of various degrees of direness. Great endings
come in the middle and at the end of this selection of pages. The first
ending in the book is an unfortunate one — a common trope in these
stories. —Samizdat

Do not miss the animations representing paths through the novel. A beautiful site! Thanks for the recommendation, Danielle!