Choose Your Own Nightmare

A fundamental influence of mine whilst i beginning my major project is the children's series Goosebumps. These horror novellas were created and authored by R.L. Stine and were very popular as i grew up as a kid, mainly for there unique story twists but also for the Choose Your Own Nightmare/ Give Yourself Goosebumps series.



Choose Your Own Nightmare Plotline

For the most part, play is rather simple, as the books are merely novels with branching plots. The books are written in the second person and enlivened by puzzles or choices. Rather than being simply from beginning to end, the reader is told to turn to a certain page at the bottom of the current page, at certain pages the reader will be given at least two choices of which page to turn to, depending on what they want the main character to do. If readers make poor choices, the book may come to a "bad" ending that will feature a horrid fate for the main character but the readers are always able to go back and choose a new choice.

There are normally two "main stories" which have their own set of choices, and a certain decision - usually at the first two choices that will determine which of the two "stories" the reader will be a part of, the other story will usually not be mentioned again. Also, there is sometimes a group of choices, which contain one choice which is blatantly wrong (such as eating the blue eggs in "Escape from Camp Run For Your Life" or failing to acknowledge the situation in "Welcome to the Wicked Wax Museum" as an emergency) if the Reader makes one of these choices the book will break the fourth wall and demand that he/she turns back and choose a better option. It is also worth noting that the main character is never named and is always of ambiguous gender; therefore the reader can easily imagine him or herself as the main character regardless of what sex he or she is. There is however a "friend character" who is named and given a gender, these characters are normally present through out the story line but there are times when they are not.



Endings

Because of the choices and page connections, there are many ways the story can end. The ways vary depending on which book is being read, but largely the endings involve the reader's character dying, being permanently turned into something other than human, getting trapped somewhere inescapable (implying that one will die eventually), being put in a state of immobility such as becoming a statue, or if the correct choices are met, surviving the story. The ending pages are the only ones which don't have any choices, and simply have the words "The End" where the choices would usually be.

There are also endings that combine the above options, such as being transformed, and then being killed because of whatever it is they are now or an almost "good" ending in which - despite the reader's transformation the ending is still relatively satisfying, in one of the books the reader can become a dog if the wrong choice is chosen, but still gets home in one ending, albeit stuck in dog form. There are sometimes choices that are bad, but will not lead to an ending immediately, but instead will take the reader to another page which will have its own choices, but all of them will lead to a bad ending - this is because a previous choice has put the reader in an inescapable situation, where there is no chance of making it out alive, and despite not dying immediately from that choice, the reader has been ultimately "killed" by making that decision.

In addition, some books involve at least one page where the reader is asked a question relating to one of the actual Goosebumps books, where the reader is given the choice of turning to one of two pages - one where they give the correct answer and one where they give the wrong answer (which usually has some subtle similarities to the correct one). Answering correctly will allow the story to continue, but answering incorrectly will normally result in death. There is at least one good ending in each book, as opposed to the 20+ scary endings.