“Unknown Tales” and Choosing Your Own Adventure with a Click

By Helen Gregg

The Choose Your Own Adventure books of my middle-school youth involving flipping through pages to discover the fate of my protagonist. Today, eBookNewser reported on a website that offers the same adventurous reading without the risk of paper cuts.

Unknown Tales is a free website that allows visitors to choose a genre (action/adventure, crime, horror, mystery, romance, sci-fi/fantasy), choose a protagonist, and then make choices at the end of each chapter to determine the course of the story. Written in second person, the stories are designed to feel as interactive as possible. The website becomes even more interactive when, if a choice you select does not have a corresponding chapter already written, you are invited to write your own. An good idea, though it is unclear how this would work in the mystery genre, in which the ending is so important.

Unknown Tales provides an interesting comparison to the various enhanced e-books that have been released recently, using interactive media not only to add to the story but to change it. The idea of a “choose your own adventure” story is not original, but it certainly has possibilities when combined with digital media.