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Real Life Gamebooks #4
Through The Wire: The Great Escape
158 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1986
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August 9, 2018
This has been a great reading experience for me.
FIRSTLY because I have so many fond memories of my first encounter with this type of book, the choose-your-own-adventure kind (I was around 9 or 10 years old, I think, playing another adventure game in book form, armed only with a pencil, paper, dice and a good deal of the adolescent's sense of wonder), which is a format I have had a hard time tracking down in libraries and bookshops, I must say, since it is a largely forgotten form of entertainment today, where computer games have taken over the market for stories and games that place you, the reader (or player) directly in the center of the story ("you are the hero", "you get to choose what to do", etc.), implying a multiplicity of paths or plot branches, now dispersing, now interlocking, and then finally resulting in a number of alternate endings.
SECONDLY because I find the time and place of the central theme and plot (drawing heavily, it must be admitted, on the film "The Great Ecape" from 1963 - even the secondary title refers directly to it) to be quite fascinating: A POW camp in Germany during the time of the Nazis.
So, was it fun to read? Yes. Yes, it certainly was. Why? Well, how can you not love the kind of stories which actually dare to say "you" - not "I", nor "he", nor "they", but "you", "YOU!", "you, the reader", "you, the protagonist" - a feat not parallelled in many other genres today. This direct address combined with the characteristic "freedom of choice" - cheap and banal though it may seem today - simply helps you feel (at least a little bit) that this really IS your own adventure, your own story, and your own - dare we say - destiny. And it IS fun to get to choose your own adventure, even though, of course, it is all just an elaborate illusion - an illusion only made possible by a fixed set of choices within a very limited framework. In the end, we are not talking about a "sand box" game here, to use modern terminology, certainly not, but then, how could we be? How would one manage to fit a "never-ending game" into the already fixed format of a printed book? The illusion of choice, on the other hand, so transparent to any adult or skilled reader - is it just a cheap trick, then, a gimmick? Perhaps. And is this, consequently, one of the reasons why this specific book genre, the (adventure) game book, so popular during the 80s, almost immeadiately faded from view and was regarded as virtually obsolete in the 90s? Maybe so. But maybe the simultaneous development of computer games are just as much to blame for this fate. And maybe we have forgotten just how much more fun it can be to play these games, when our own imagination (and not a 3D-graphics card) has to do most of the work for us.
FIRSTLY because I have so many fond memories of my first encounter with this type of book, the choose-your-own-adventure kind (I was around 9 or 10 years old, I think, playing another adventure game in book form, armed only with a pencil, paper, dice and a good deal of the adolescent's sense of wonder), which is a format I have had a hard time tracking down in libraries and bookshops, I must say, since it is a largely forgotten form of entertainment today, where computer games have taken over the market for stories and games that place you, the reader (or player) directly in the center of the story ("you are the hero", "you get to choose what to do", etc.), implying a multiplicity of paths or plot branches, now dispersing, now interlocking, and then finally resulting in a number of alternate endings.
SECONDLY because I find the time and place of the central theme and plot (drawing heavily, it must be admitted, on the film "The Great Ecape" from 1963 - even the secondary title refers directly to it) to be quite fascinating: A POW camp in Germany during the time of the Nazis.
So, was it fun to read? Yes. Yes, it certainly was. Why? Well, how can you not love the kind of stories which actually dare to say "you" - not "I", nor "he", nor "they", but "you", "YOU!", "you, the reader", "you, the protagonist" - a feat not parallelled in many other genres today. This direct address combined with the characteristic "freedom of choice" - cheap and banal though it may seem today - simply helps you feel (at least a little bit) that this really IS your own adventure, your own story, and your own - dare we say - destiny. And it IS fun to get to choose your own adventure, even though, of course, it is all just an elaborate illusion - an illusion only made possible by a fixed set of choices within a very limited framework. In the end, we are not talking about a "sand box" game here, to use modern terminology, certainly not, but then, how could we be? How would one manage to fit a "never-ending game" into the already fixed format of a printed book? The illusion of choice, on the other hand, so transparent to any adult or skilled reader - is it just a cheap trick, then, a gimmick? Perhaps. And is this, consequently, one of the reasons why this specific book genre, the (adventure) game book, so popular during the 80s, almost immeadiately faded from view and was regarded as virtually obsolete in the 90s? Maybe so. But maybe the simultaneous development of computer games are just as much to blame for this fate. And maybe we have forgotten just how much more fun it can be to play these games, when our own imagination (and not a 3D-graphics card) has to do most of the work for us.
Displaying 1 of 1 review