We've Moved!

 

Apparently Blogspot doesn't get much love on search engines, so we've relocated to Wordpress. Head over to the NEW Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack to read tons of articles and keep track of what I'm doing and where I'm appearing!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing Gamebooks: the Uncle Mac Way

Image
  I paid a visit to  Lloyd of Gamebooks to share a guest post about my approach to writing in the genre. Lloyd's community is chock full of gamebook fans and authors, so be sure to follow them as well and read their Lindenbaum Gamebook Contest entries. In the post I summarize a few different approaches to making a gamebook, such as mapping the forks in the story with sticky notes, and my own analog method called the Chapter Drafting Method . If you want to write a gamebook, but aren't sure how, the posts at Lloyd of Gamebooks should help you out.
Read more

GI Joe: Operation Poison Dart

Image
"You mean you go to your doctor for a flu shot, tetanus shot--even the booster shots little kids get--and you get souped up with COBRA mind potion number one?" There are a lot of GI Joe gamebooks by Find Your Fate, but this one came highly recommended, so I decided to snatch it up. It didn't disappoint, either.  Obviously it's written for kids around ten years old, but I was surprised by how readable it was for an adult. Operation Poison Dart puts you in control of a new Joe called Headset, an expert in mind control and hypnotism whose gadget is a special strobe light that instantly hypnotizes people. There are several points throughout the book where you get to use this ability to trick people into doing your bidding, and Headset does prove himself useful during the rare scene when he's been deprived of his precious gizmo. Your mission is surprisingly topical: stop Dr Mindbender and COBRA from using a bogus vaccine to control people. I can hear the Google fact ch...
Read more

What is a Gamebook? Also, Holiday in Castle Quarantine Now Released!

Image
 Welcome to the Gamebook Shack, where I will be posting reviews of gamebooks, talking about board games, possibly video games, and other weird stuff. I'll post updates about author events as well for anyone who wants to come say hello. What is a gamebook, anyway? Gamebooks are interactive fiction. You probably know them as "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, which is actually the name of the brand that kicked off this fascinating sub-genre of fiction way back in 1976. Gamebooks allow you, the reader, to decide what the hero does and, to an extent, how the story ends. There have been many interactive fiction experiments since the early 1940s (look up authors Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Raymond Queneau for examples), but CYOA launched the genre into the mainstream. Countless publishers jumped on the bandwagon and launched their own gamebook brands. Some were simple and straightforward with chapters consisting of only one or two pages, while others read more like s...
Read more