Choose Your Own Adventure
This may be the longest and geekiest article we’ve ever linked to in the short history of iblogo, but…
I was fascinated by this incredibly detailed, systematic article about the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. It’s a bit of mind-bender, but has some incredible things to say about the way we organize information, specifically in stories.
It is less surprising that this kind of interactive, hypertextual book happened at all than that it happened so late in the life of the book as a medium. One of the fundamental properties of books as objects is their ability to be dealt with in a random access fashion. All those loose paper edges let you jump to a page more or less directly, without having to go through all the intervening material as you would with an ancient scroll…
I’m becoming more and more convinced that the Bible is first and foremost the story of God and God’s people. And that’s the way I want to discuss it and communicate it to others. As a story.
But what makes this so difficult is that the the Bible is a book, a “random access” medium. And almost none of us here in North America come to it first as a story. Beyond that, we’ve worked to make it easier to access any part of it randomly, giving it chapters and verses, indexing it, etc.
(Even outside of the church, most people know what John 3:16 says before they have any context about who said it, when it was said, where, why…)
I think we’re just on the front end of a new era of teaching the Bible from a narrative standpoint. I wonder if somewhere in the future, we’ll be able to spend less time helping one another unlearn our random-access patterns, and more time just telling the story?
