Choose your own adventure

Choose your own adventure games are works of interactive fiction that contain narratives that branch according to a number of choices given to the player. These choices are presented frequently and are given in a multiple-choice format. Typically, many, if not nearly all, choices will lead to abrupt dead ends/bad endings.

The kinds of choices presented to a player (and their results) are generally heavily influenced by the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books (popularized in the 1980s), or more broadly, by gamebooks as a whole. Gamebooks implemented nonlinear stories in print by including page numbers of the continuation of the story after a given choice. Because including multiple long paths in this format would have made flipping back to previous choices cumbersome, most choices in gamebooks often result in abrupt "bad endings," a convention that still persists in many CYOA games today.