Named for a work: Choose Your Own Adventure

Named for the Choose Your Own Adventure series it seems that the references to the work all link back to this page. It even has a page image from the Choose Your Own Adventure book series.

Uh. Well, the work should get a literature/Choose Your Own Adventure page, or whatever namespace we're using for that. As far as this trope's title goes, I highly doubt we can do better.

edited 25th Oct '10 8:03:40 AM by TripleElation

Good point. There does need to be a place to put tropes from the actual CYOA series itself. But "choose your own adventure" seems to have become the usual generic term used by the public for this sort of thing. I'd suggest calling it Adventure Gamebook, but they aren't all books. Branching Adventure?

Seriously? I had absolutely no idea it was a brand name as opposed to a generic term for that sort of thing.

It's a 185 book series that was written from 1979-1998. It's still in print.

edited 25th Oct '10 8:08:38 AM by shimaspawn

I'm familiar with the series; it's just that the name holds the Xerox effect for me; it's something I recognized as a name for the genre rather than for a specific product within said genre, even if it was the genre maker.

And that's the real issue here. The book series used the name first, and by our standards that means it gets first dibs, but because of it's popularity, it's wound up name it's own genre.

I'm not seeing how that's a problem though.

If this is just about finding space for a work page for the original book series itself, I'd suggest just making a separate work page at Choose Your Own Adventure, like Triple Elation had suggested.

edited 25th Oct '10 8:42:40 AM by SeanMurrayI

No. A trope cannot have the exact name of a work it is named for. This trope has to be renamed. Leaving it as the genre just invites confusion over whether it's the genre or series.

Besides, it wouldn't take too much work. Choose Your Own Plot would require no moving entries on any alphabetical lists, so it would be the most efficient.

It's a genre's name. This is how people call the genre. Renaming it would be like renaming Film to Cinema just because it turns out that there is a 18th century novel called Film.

edited 25th Oct '10 9:46:49 AM by EternalSeptember

I'd say this is similar to the "pre-existing term" clause we have for work/name conflicts, except in this case, the original work launched the term for the genre. Much like all tissues are called Kleenex and all adhesive medical strips are called Band Aids, all books in this genre are Choose Your Own Adventure books. Against a rename.

Technically, the name of the genre is "Game Book". Which I think would be a favorable rename, since it also encompasses/more accurately describes things like Lone Wolf.

I see it's also an existing redirect. And it seems like if you read the description as it stands without knowing the title, you would probably expect the article to be named "Game Book". So that's my vote.

edited 25th Oct '10 10:31:45 AM by Haven

I know the page isn't all sorted, but it's not not all books. There's also the fact that Game Book is also what the books for Tabletop Games are called.

"Renaming it would be like renaming Film to Cinema just because it turns out that there is a 18th century novel called Film."

What? The CYOA series is the source of the name. You're basically claiming the series is obscure and that the name cropped up independently.

Also, even an established term named for a work still gives the names the main dibs, and still means we rename the trope. Groundhog Day is the term usually given for the plot named for the film Groundhog Day, but we still renamed it to "Groundhog Day" Loop to avoid confusion.

This one is just... gonna be hard. Game Book is, in fact, the technical term for this type of book, but Choose Your Own Adventure is what everyone calls it due to Brand Name Takeover. What.... we should -probably- do is either make Choose Your Own Adventure the works page and put a link AT THE VERY TOP OF THE ARTICLE to Game Book for the trope, or make a disambiguation page.

Disambiguation pages aren't very much en vogue on this wiki for some reason.

In French, Fighting Fantasy, Grail Quest, Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger were all published under the same imprint, called "A Book in which YOU are the Hero". It might not work as smoothly in English, but anyway I'm offering it, feel free to shoot it down.

Turn the main into a disambiguation page. Point to the series under the Literature namespace, and Game Book under the main. Simple.

edited 25th Oct '10 12:20:01 PM by Ghilz

Game Book has potential to be misread. But a disambig page is probably the cleanest way to go.

Or give the genre a Genre/ namespace, since the series did name it, so it should have the Main/ namespace.

Except that alot of people looking for the genre are likely to type the series name (Brand Name Takeover and all). So a disambiguation page makes sure everyone finds what they are looking for. While giving the series the proper priority it deserves is nice, the main priority should be convenience for the reader.

edited 25th Oct '10 12:49:23 PM by Ghilz

I think the question was if we should make the trope page Main.Game Book or Genre.Choose Your Own Adventure to go along with Main.Choose Your Own Adventure as the disambiguation page and Lit.Choose Your Own Adventure for the book series.

Main.Game Books, as it is the proper names of these things AFAIK.

I don't think we need a disambiguation page for this—just a note at the top of Choose Your Own Adventure that "if you are looking for the genre, see Game Book".

And I don't see Game Book as necessarily inspiring confusion (I don't think I've ever heard "game book" used to refer to a Tabletop RPG manual; those are usually called source book or splat book [though this wiki has a definition for that term a bit different than what I knew for it]), but if it does, well, that's just what it's called; it's a pre-existing term, so if someone is confused by it, they'll be corrected.

And again, if you look at the first paragraph of the article, it seems to be on the subject matter of game books:

Gamebooks are Interactive Fiction and a paper Adventure Game. The player advances the action by reading a short passage describing a scene and choosing one of several actions. To take that action, the player reads a numbered section in the book. The Choose Your Own Adventure series is famous and highly successful example of the gamebook genre with 250 million copies in print. The peak of the gamebook craze came in the 1980s, but the form is far from dead.

And that doesn't mean the description should be changed—I think, rather, the title should. As for the non-book examples, some of them should be phased out—Ruby Quest, for instance, is more like Interactive Fiction and doesn't have much to do with this trope whatever you call it—while others should probably be be left in place; even if they are not print or textual media, it's the genre that counts, and gamebook, Brand Name Takeover aside, is what the genre is called.

(Also, examples of tropes from Lone Wolf already tend to be sorted under Game Book.)

edited 25th Oct '10 1:12:24 PM by Haven

"Brand Name Takeover and all"

That is an effect trope, not a rule trope. Plus it mainly applies to non work brands, not works that still should be allowed their own pages.

We could also launch the actual series under the title The Choose Your Own Adventure Series. It wasn't ever an actual work, but a series of works that are only tied together with a brand name, like the Disney Animated Canon, or the Nasuverse.