The world of creative fiction is about to open up before your students. One of the most engaging ways to create fiction is to consider Choose Our Way Tales (or COWtales, as I like to call them). These stories go by many different names:

• Choose your own adventure
• Choose your scare
• Pick your path
• Adventure books

Many of those are legally owned terms which cannot be used by others. Once upon a time, NetFlix attempted to use the term Choose Your Own Adventure in an episode of Black Mirror without permission, and things did not go as planned for them. As educators I recommend we avoid the term as well.

English Course Pack: Unit Four – Creating Writing and Choose Our Way Tales

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4.02 – Introducing Choose Our Way Tales

Slides 3 – 6: The Basic Parts of a Choose Our Way Tale

What better way to explore the concept of multi-path story telling than through an exemplar of multiple-path story telling. On these slides, students will be able to chart a journey through the slide deck, moving from one slide to another.

This serves multiple purposes. On one hand, it shows students how to use these types of stories, and indicates that narrative tales can veer off in a variety of directions. Additionally, it introduces the concept that even though there may be multiple paths to get somewhere, that doesn’t mean that the ending will always be the same. This is often referred to a “railroading” where the beginning and the end are fixed points, while the journey differs. Finally, it shows students that if they want to create their own stories using this format, Google Slides is an acceptable tool to create effective narratives.

Slides 7: Quest

Now that students have made their way through the mini COWtale, it’s time to experience another form of branching path. Quest is a YouTube adventure that allows users to pick their paths. Again, this highlights another tool that students can use to create a multi-media, multi-branching narrative.

I recommend that the full class plays through this story as one, moving from point to point. When you feel students have a strong understanding of how QUEST works, you can share the link of the current video you are on and allow students to plug in headphones and experience the narrative on their own terms.

After ten or twenty minutes, students will be able to explain their experience with Quest. While I have not found a branching story map for QUEST, it does seem there are some very different paths that players / experiencers can take. However, there are some other fixed points that it seems all players move through.

By the end of this experience, hopefully your students have bought into the idea of a gamified narrative, and have a solid foundation of how these texts are both shaped, and work.

Slides 9 – 10: Story Maps

When you reach Slide 9, take a moment to look at the story map on page nine, but don’t give away the game quite so early. Allow students to puzzle over the visual and try to determine what it might be that they are looking at prior to engaging with it.

Students will notice there are three main features:

• Triangles
• Circles
• Squares

They may also notice the different colours and ascribe some meaning to that as well.

After time has been provided for a think-pair-share experience, provide students with the solution to this image. Let them know that the triangles represent pages in a story, the circles are moments where a choice can be made, and the squares are endings. You can reinforce this by having them count the number of endings, and the number of choices. If you really want to work in some numeracy, try to have them calculate how many possible variations of the narrative are possible. For this story it’s easy, as when a path branches, it never returns together. But, there will be far more complex story maps to be discovered both with games, and texts, online.

On Slide 10, students can work to determine what this is a map of. Indeed it is a map of the quick COWtale at the start of the slide deck.

Slides 11 – 16: Different Types of COW Tales

These slides walk students through the various different types of COWtales they are likely to encounter, and point out some variations of the form that they already be familiar with.

Slide 11 – Story Maps (The Return!)

This slide features that previously mentioned more-complex Story Map. This is where you could really ramp up the numeracy and ask students to determine the number of possible outcomes. The fact that this version involves the new “looping” mechanic really adds to the complexity. There is one ending that sends you back to the beginning, doubling all possible outcomes.

There’s probably a simple mathematical way to calculate this. But, I’m and English teacher. Feel free to comment if you have figured it out!

This slide also indicates that only Choose Your Own Adventure is Choose Your Own Adventure.

Slide 12 – Cautionary Tales

A quick reminder that NetFlix lost the legal battle to CYOA, so it’s not likely to go any better for teachers or students!

Slide 14 – The Texts are Out There

Here, you can introduce students to a variety of COWtales they have likely encountered, from the incredibly popular Goosebumps Choose the Scare series, to the more recent LEGO/DK Choose Your Path narratives. Ryan North has also created some very interesting texts that are often found within a classroom setting.

Finally, the last image (Choose your own Misery) highlights the fact that while you can’t use “Choose Your Own Adventure” you can use a parody of the form, and even the design. There are a number of different books out there, including the early RL Stein work (before Goosebumps) when he wrote Indiana Jones pick a path adventures.

Slide 15 – Why Not Videos?

Students with access to NetFlix can engage with a variety of video version of COWtales. They range from straight forward experiences, to one that are variations of video games. What is interesting is that almost every type of genre has been embraced. There are WWE Wrestling versions, as well as survival tales. They range from those intended to younger audiences, like Carmen Santiago, to those for adults, like Bandersnatch.

This should also highlight to students the popularity of these forms of narrative, and how what is written on the COWtale page can be converted into other forms of media without much additional consideration.

Slide 16 -All the Games!

Students will likely be more familiar with COWtales in the form of video games, or even board games. You can highlight the fact that Choose Your Own Adventure has licensed a number of their own books to become board games. Additionally, all of the TellTale games are essentially COWtales with a railroaded path from start to finish, with a number of possible variations along the way.

Video games are often railroaded because it doesn’t make sense to end the narrative one hour into a possible twenty hour experience. And, when those unfortunate endings do occur, it is often pointed out that that was an unfortunate and premature conclusion, where reloading the previous save and moving on are best suggested.

While one could argue that games like Disco Elysium are COWtales, it isn’t so much that there are choice points as much as an open world with choices. TellTale games and the more recent Dark Picture Anthology are just COWtales with the occasional need to move a joystick to walk around.

Finally, you will find Sammi’s Quest which is detailed on the next section.

Slide 17: Sammi’s Quest

Sammi’s Quest is a COWtale that I created for Android, as I often show students how to adapt their narrative to become an app that can be played through as well as read. With limited changes, students can take their narrative to a much larger audience.

While Android is constantly updating the requirements for apps, it is possible that this app is no longer accessible, but there are still screenshots that show how basic buttons can be included with options, and how even they can create what might be considered more of a game.

The Impact

By this point students are aware of COWtales, they are familiar with them in both the video, and text based formats, and they have been able to consider what might be required to create their own media pieces.

This lesson allows them to reshape how they think of narratives, and short story writing, taking them from the single story idea, to a wider reaching gamified version that lets them use all of their ideas, not just the strongest one that forces the characters in one direction, while ignoring possible alternatives.

Next up? The Palm Story (Planning a Short Story)

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English – Unit Four: Creative Writing & Choose Our Way Tales

English Course Packs: Full Units

Unit One: Literacy Skills
Unit Two: Poetry
Unit Three: Literature Circles
Unit Four: Creative Writing & Choose Our Way Tales (In Progress)
Unit Five: Essay Writing (In Progress)
Unit Six: Culminating Tasks (In Progress)

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