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Notes -
But there is a second story! Who is Kinbote, really? Did he kill Shade? Where are the jewels? Are the index cards of the poem actually in the right order? Is Zembla even real? I recommend this frankly brilliant and insane paper to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, and it's not at all apparent from simply opening the book any more than Gwyndolin's story is from looking up the description of his crown.
You're welcome to avoid that, I honestly wouldn't ever consider watching Satantango again, but for anybody interested in Seiobo, the first chapter is available free here and has bitten quite a few of my friends with the bug.
Choose-your-own-adventure books have some similarities but are too limited. You could, in theory, write one that kept track of variables, had branches that intertwine deeply, etc., but nobody actually would. It's a huge difference, I'd say bigger than that between a comic book and a movie. I'm not sure what you mean by "experience" - if you mean words aren't an experience, I recall people experimenting with choose-your-own adventure DVDs, but those have even worse capability issues than the books.
Necro posting that i finally read this paper, neat. Found out my copy of Pale Fire corrected the italics for "Hiding place".
Crazy shit, huh?
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