Chooseable path?

So, I’m currently reading “To Be OR Not To Be” – a chooseable-path version of Hamlet written by Ryan North, who I suspect may be some sort of genius.  Or an idiot savant.  I’m not sure.  Maybe there isn’t a difference.

And “reading” is a bit of a loose term for this book.  “Playing” comes closer.  I’m playing a book.  I get to a point where the book says “do you want to go back to Denmark or become a pirate?” and I can’t help but shout “Pirate!”  Which causes no end of consternation in my household.

What is causing *me* no end of consternation is the fact that, if I loose my place, I can never find it again.  This book is labyrinthine.  I’m deliberately making choices I know will send me down dead ends, just so I can see which end it sends me to, but when I try to go back to find the original thread I branched off...

Judicious use of bookmarks hasn’t saved me as often as I would have liked.

I always hated “choose your own adventure” books when I was a kid.  They seemed unnecessarily light on plot, and that whole second person thing was always a bit naff.  This one, however, is totes rad, bro.  It’s oozing radditude.

There’s even a “chooseable path” book within the “chooseable path” book – to replace the play-within-a-play in the heart of Hamlet.  Sweet.

It may have also been written entirely in that weird post-surfer/skeghead slang that often perpetuates internet chatrooms and is notable in movies like “Dude, Where’s my Car?”.

Anyway, I was just sitting here, flicking through a grammar book for a German assignment, when it suddenly hit me:

Do you know what would make an awesome chooseable path book?  A book on grammar, that’s what.

No, seriously. 

Although, by “awesome”, I may just mean “seriously interesting to people who like this sort of stuff”, and possibly useful for other people”.

Imagine it:  You are given a sentence or some dialogue, and then given options as to which mini-lesson you want to branch off from that passage.

Das Mädchen will nicht sein Frühstuck essen, weil das mit der Katze spielt.

To a) Find out why the conjugated verb is suddenly at the end of the sentence, go to p18

b) Find out what happens when you use “mit” in front of a feminine noun, go to p26

c) Find out why we call the girl “it” rather than “she”, go to p29

d) See what happens to this sentence when you change the tense, go to p35

You pick “b” and are taken to a minilesson that uses that sentence (and others) to explain that “mit” is a preposition that must always be followed by the dative case, and feminine nouns switch their articles from “die” to “der” in the dative.  Then:

To a) See more dative prepositions, go to p15

b) Find out what happens to feminine nouns in the genitive case, go to p21

c) Try an exercise to test your knowledge of noun genders, go to p42

You choose your own grammar lesson!  And it’s based entirely on prompting you to ask a question and go looking for the answer - which means the answers are likely to be more meaningful for you, and you might be more likely to remember them!

It takes parsing sentences to a whole new level!

That’s exciting.  Try to at least pretend you think it’s cool.