Reading a choose-your-own-adventure book is pretty fun, but it can be hard to retrace your story. Any attempt to place your chapters back-to-back would require ripping pages out of the book, and that's certainly no fun.
But what if you could have a CYOA print out your story as you went, leaving you with a manuscript of your adventure? That's the concept behind The Choosatron, a very cool interactive fiction arcade machine made by Jerry Belich.
At a GDC party last week, Stephen Totilo and I played with the Choosatron and had a good time. (Watch Stephen play through a story in the video above. Also, my apologies for the intermittent focusing issues - I'd left my camera on autofocus and it was betraying me. Never again, I say!)
The hook is, the Choosatron can tell any of a theoretically infinite number of stories and as it does so, it prints the story out on receipt paper. At the end, you tear off your receipt and keep your story. It's a good hook! People on the internet agreed, more than funding the project when it turned up last year on Kickstarter. Belich says that he's now exploring niche retail options to sell the Choosatron online.
After using it last week, I'd love to have one. I'd write my own stories, leave it out at parties… it'd be a blast.