Giraffe Adventures Update #3

I got back to work on Giraffe Adventures today after avoiding it for quite a while. Here's the thing with choose your own adventure stories: even if you're only giving the reader binary choices, after just 10 pages you have 2^10 = 1,024 story threads. ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY GOD DAMN FOUR. In practice, of course, it doesn't necessarily work out to quite that many, as threads are terminated in story endings or merged with other threads.

Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.

Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.

The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.

YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.