I loved these books growing up, and finished my brothers' collection once I had the money.

Gamebook mappingEdit

I'm interested in digitizing the structure of gamebooks to analyse them fully.

My first attempt was with Sword of the Samurai, thinking the quite linear nature and lack of very complex rules would make it a straightforward starting point. I went through the book with my brother, him reading the paragraph links and me typing them out, and then wrote a simple program to test if there were any "island" paragraphs. #99 (the Seppuku honour death paragraph) was to be expected, but there was another find: #157 seemed to be an unused swamp death! I gave up on it at the time, but thinking more about making a standard format for gamebooks some years later I remembered this forgotten paragraph I'd found, and decided to add it to the article. Before I did, I decided to recheck all the swamp paragraphs, just to make sure there was no mistake, and to my disappointment found that I'd mistyped the link from #181!

I still think there may be a few genuine "islands" in the Fighting Fantasy series (at least a few undiscovered anti-cheating ones), and the possibility of probability calculation (including on-the-fly using any stat combination from any given paragraph), hard-mapping and so on mean I haven't given up on the idea completely! If you're interested in the project then give me a shout on my talk page.