In Slate, Rebecca Onion has an interview with a historian of capitalism who has retraced the history of "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels -- it's a lot of fun. In it, they talk about how the format of Choose Your Own Adventure, dismissed by publishers at first and then adopted enthusiastically a decade later, was akin to the plot structure of early computer games. Now, I liked Choose Your Own Adventure as much as anybody, but what I really loved was the text-based Infocom game, Zork.