At the bottom of page 40 ofThe Abominable Snowman by R.A. Montgomery I am abruptly given a choice. The page addresses me directly, as “you”. It tells me that I am in a Tibetan monastery drinking yak-butter tea with a monk. There is the sound of bell-ringing in the distance, and wind shuffling the pine trees. After sitting in silence “for what seems like hours, listening with [my] whole being,” the monk at last invites me to go on a journey. If I wish to comply, I must turn to page 51. If, on the other hand, I decide that I am “not prepared to change [my] life forever,” I should turn to page 63. While there is nothing strange about a media artefact claiming to be able to change my life forever, it is rare that one should offer the means of doing so through a simple turn of the page. Merely by making this claim, and despite my awareness thatThe Abominable Snowman is only a game, Montgomery imbues the act of page-turning with a significance beyond the merely functional; it becomes a way of confirming that the “you” in the text is me, that I have a presence in the book, that I am not only reading but playing.
The structure of this kind of “game book” – that of a maze with multiple routes, many leading to unsatisfying endings – was seemingly envisaged by Jorges Luis Borges in his 1941 short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a text frequently cited in the field of game studies. In the story, the Sinologist Stephen Albert claims to have solved the mystery of what became of the two great projects conceived by a famous Chinese governor, Ts’ui Pen:
Ts’ui Pen must have s
