The least satisfying is the dead end: make the wrong choice and the story ends. It matters little whether the ending is “successful.” The most satisfying pattern may be the quiz: you should be able to pick the correct answer (out of several choices) based on your previous reading.

Ultimately the shape of the graph is but a small aspect of the quality of the story. I’m aware of the criticism of branching narrative, particularly the frequent use of foldback to offset the exponential cost of branching. Even if two paths converge, however, they can still be different paths. This is bad example, but imagine that you’re reading a whodunnit, and one of the digressions contains a spoiler, “The butler did it.” You perceive a different story depending on whether you visit that node, kind of like watching Sixth Sense or Memento a second time.

I’m sure many people interested in interactive / non-linear narrative have read Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck. I was struck by her description of the Kuleshov effect, and the ways in which an author can exploit it. Essentially, Kuleshov recognized the ability of the audience to stitch together fragments into a cohesive story. By combining ambiguous foldback fragments (which Murray sometimes calls lexia or lazzi) with defining branch fragments, I think a satisfying branching narrative is possible.

The main character even gets a worse ending (stating that she’s embarassed and can’t date the doctor after her foolish behaviour) for having a one night stand (granted it’s with a drug dealer) and for being nosey. However, if I remember correctly, it’s also a positive ending when she becomes a sex-goddess for and alien planet, so it’s definitely more open-minded than many of the books marketed to teenage girls.

I recently rediscovered a Famous Five Adventure Game book from my childhood that I’d completely forgotten – my seven-year-old was so pleased with it that she insisted I read it for her three times in a row, because “something different might happen this time!” Something different never did happen, the game was very much set up with several paths leading to the same end – or you fail, which can happen whenever you have no picnic lunches left.

This book’s more of a game than a choose-your-own-adventure, though it’s different again from the Steve Jackson gamebooks. You have three picnic lunches (bits of card) that you put in your backpack, which is another card, with a drawing of a backpack, and a slit for the lunches to fit into. When something goes wrong or you make a bad choice, the Famous Five get hungry and you’re instructed to eat a lunch. When you have none left, you have to go home – so that ending’s a general rule rather than something written into individual pages. There’s no direct narration of the end at all actually. The other possible ending is that you discover the thieves, fetch the police and watch the police arresting the thieves – I don’t think we found any other endings, anyway.

The book comes with four other items, apart from the picnics – binoculars, a compass, a codebook and a map. You can only choose to bring one of these on the adventure, and they all help you figure out which page to go to. If you don’t have the needed item, you need to guess which of a number of pages to go to. If you do things right you’ll find other objects. (“On the way, the light from their lamp made something gleam in the heather. It was a compass! They took it with them as a spare.”

Because the plot branches but then always meets again its map would look rather different from yours, Andrew – sections are reused, but not very excitingly, just because you join up with another path.

After three readings my daughter stopped asking for more. I’m not sure if this was because I was less willing to read it AGAIN or because she realised that it was not going to be very different whatever choices we made. She also cheated more and more, after being very strict the first time round. The last time she decided to bring the compass, the map, the binoculars AND the codebook with her from the start. With all those tools she raced straight to the end. And I suppose that, for her, was closure.

I wanted to warn other readers that this book is underwhelming in the scope of its ambition. It is neither deep nor pornographic nor containing insight about relationships (not the variations I’ve read thus far), and is consciously designed to look and read like one of those childrens books. But without any functioning irony: while purportedly being about adult situations, this novel is written at an adolescent reading level. Artistically (and sociologically), the author did not try to do anything new, which is a crushing disappointment for a type of literature that is wide open for creative experimentation.

I copied your diagram to my site, I hope you don’t mind. It will be surrounded there by other types of diagrams concerning fiction.

Yes, I’m pretty sure the ambition of the author/publisher of this book is not to make a impressive or thoughtful interactive story, but to use the choose-your-own-adventure gimmick to attract the buyer’s attention, to sell more copies. (oops, I’m being condescending… you’re probably right that there is room for experimentation in this form; it doesn’t have to feel so gimmicky.)