WHAT ADVENTURES ARE CHOSEN TODAY? GAMEBOOKS: EVOLUTION

Abstract

Despite a great number of papers dedicated to various genres and types of fiction, as well as to their evolutionary development, gamebooks make up a new field of research, calling for attention, but so far rather understudied, which accounts for both topicality and novelty of the given investigation which aims at disclosing the origin of gamebooks and revealing the major lingual and structural differences between gamebooks published in the XXI century and those that go twenty years back. In terms of research methods, the presented work is carried out within the anthropocentric paradigm and looks at the phenomenon of gamebooks through the prism of man as language user. The texts were studied in accordance with the philosophic laws of unity of form and meaning, employing induction, deduction, contextual analysis and text interpretation, quantitative and qualitative method and certain elements of diachronic and comparative analysis. In the result of our investigation, the following conclusions have been made. Featuring the same plotlines, “new” editions of the same gamebooks boast verbal and non-verbal differences from their “older” copies. While the latter provided pictures mainly as supportive material, the more recent editions tend to multimodality, giving information important for narration development in pictures that imitate letters or function as clues in the story and are not resting on any other verbal elements, mentioning or describing them. More recent gamebooks tend to sound more democratic from the viewpoint of word choice and demonstrate more political correctness and fewer technical details, concerning equipment or weapons. They have undergone general verbal extension, though the number of “turning” (“node”) points has been preserved, which testifies to the interactive level of non-linear narrative in gamebooks that is high enough for 21st-century fiction. The most striking difference between books separated in time by almost 20 years is the growing volume of dialogue in modern editions. Though still less popular than author’s narrative (as is characteristic of gamebooks, in general), dialogue makes modern stories more interactive and entertaining for their readers and offers them a more realistic experience.