A friend in grad. school reviewed academic journals on CYOA in terms of how this novel structure tricks the child reader's sense of agency though choice architecture. Here's a relevant excerpt:

"R.A. Montgomery’s CYOA book House of Danger can be used as a model for our analysis. Categorized at a 5th grade reading level by Chooseco, the book is placed into Sutton-Smith’s age of hero adventures but not all of the 20 different endings will result in a “happily ever after” (in fact, 10 are positive, 7 negative, and 3 inconclusive). As all CYOA books begin, it warns that “You and YOU ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story”. It goes on to say:

The adventures you take are a result of your choice. You are responsible because you choose! After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens to you next. Think carefully before you make a move. One mistake could be your last...or it might lead you out of the House of Danger.

A “Danger Trivia Quiz” at the end of the book asks, “How many adventures did you take through the House of Danger? If you can’t solve this trivia quiz, perhaps you should take a few more” inferring that the reader has the agency to choose multiple versions of the story rather than settling for the original path.

In House of Danger “you” are an amateur detective who receives a peculiar phone call asking for help that leads you to a mysterious house next to a ruin of a prison destroyed by fire over 100 years before. Whether the caller is a ghost or a professor depends upon the path you choose. Multiple paths involve real or imagined attack chimpanzees, counterfeiters, and alien worlds. The reader is in charge.

Wolfgang Iser, in his book The Act of Reading, argues that the reader is integral in the creation of the world that the author lays out:

This ‘transfer’ of text to reader is often regarded as being brought about solely by the text. Any successful transfer however -- though initiated by the text -- depends on the extent to which this text can activate the individual reader’s faculties of perceiving and processing. Although the text may well incorporate the social norms and values of its possible readers, its function is not merely to present such data, but, in fact, to use them in order to secure its uptake. In other words it offers guidance as to what is to be produced, and therefore cannot itself be the product.

While Iser was not specifically speaking of the reader’s experience with a CYOA book, it seems clear that the ‘product’ of the world created in a CYOA book requires the reader’s participation even more so as there is not a single product for the reader to ‘take up’. She must choose the product in cooperation with the author. In the case of House of Danger, the reader may choose a path to an ending that involved just 3 choices and a total of 10 pages read (which ends inconclusively with the mystery unsolved thus likely enticing the reader to retrace her steps and begin again) or a path of 7 choices and 16 total pages read (that path ends in success with the counterfeiters caught. With half the endings being negative or inconclusive, it is likely that the reader will accept the invitation to keep trying other paths to get to the “happily ever after” that Sutton-Smith says this age group is seeking.

Kelly Angileri, in her article “Choose-Your-Own-Readers-Response-Adventure: Decoding Children’s Literature and Coloring Books”, analyzed CYOA books in light of three different reader response theorists, including Iser. “This type of book fits in perfectly with Iser’s idea in which the reader formulates the unformulated. It is like a do-it-yourself story-kit or ‘salad bar story’”. That is, a diner builds his salad by combining the ingredients offered, just as the reader builds the world of a CYOA book through the ingredients offered by the author. Montgomery, in House of Danger, offers a menu of worlds: dilapidated prison, modern house, laboratory, alien space ship, alien planet, dark basement, zoo, and quiet street. He also offers different “rulers” for those worlds including: professors, criminals, police, ghosts, aliens, detectives, wardens, guards, and intelligent chimpanzees. It is up to the reader to create the “world” salad from the ingredients Montgomery offers.

Although R. A. Montgomery passed away in 2014, his wife, Shannon Gilligan, has continued their business as both an author and publisher of Chooseco, the Choose Your Own Adventure publishing company they started in 2006 after purchasing the rights to the series which was published earlier by Bantam Books.

“Agency is central to it,” Gilligan says of the reader’s involvement in their CYOA books, “‘You’ are the person making the choices.” She notes that Montgomery did not want there to be a premium placed on some choices over others. “Ray did not want choices that were the ‘good’ choices to end up with good endings or ‘bad’ with bad endings. That is not the way the world works. He wanted to give kids the sense of the complexity of life.”

Gilligan says Montgomery began his stories by mapping out the pathways of all possible choices with page numbers, then he would write the story to fit that pattern. Each story had a unique set of patterns, although they had some parameters like fitting the whole book within 95-105 pages and not reaching an ending too soon (in shorter than three choices). “Ray would draw a map and he would stick to it,” Gilligan says. In recent years, they have added the story map to the back of their books to allow readers to visualize the possibilities. Their maps are modeled on the iconic 1970’s map of the New York City Subways...

However, Pfahl disagrees with Landow in this:

By limiting the number of choices the reader can make, the Choose Your Own Adventure authors would seem to better “empower” the reader, by Landow’s logic. However, it seems instead that the more that the author influences that choice, the more clear it is that the reader lacks agency. Furthermore, simply making a choice does not give a reader authorial control over a text… the simplified example of the Choose Your Own Adventure books shows that choices do not give the reader agency – since the author provides both the options and the results of them.

Although Pfahl sees the path options available through a CYOA book as a lack of reader agency, Espen J. Aarseth agrees with Landow and argues that the paths and options elevate the reader in a cybertext such as this {Aarseth defines cybertexts as “texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons(the string paths)”}to the level of a “player” in the narrative. Aarseth says:

The cybertext reader, on the other hand {as opposed to the reader of a linear narrative}, is not safe, and therefore,
it can be argued, she is not a reader. The cybertext puts
the would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The
effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader
raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention
...a struggle not merely for interpretive insight but for Narrative control; “I want this text to tell my story; the
Story that could not be without me.”

Since the reader is making the decisions AND taking the risks that arise from those choices (in House of Danger, some choices could lead to you being vaporized, eaten by aliens, killed by chimpanzees or stranded on an alien world), Aarseth allows that the role, while not at the level of the author, is greater than that of a reader just entering the author’s world. This active participation seems to call for an intermediary term between reader and author."

If anyone is interested in reading further, email me at StorysquadHQ[at]gmail.com and I'll share the rest. Happy holidays, hackers. :)

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