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I’m a big fan of Choose Your Own Adventure Games – both having students play them, and having them create ones.

That’s why I have The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories.

They’re wonderful for fiction and, if done very, very carefully, can be effective learning and teaching tools for exploring historical and even current events.

They can also be terrible.

Rafranz Davis has discussed those problems in a slave simulation (also see THOUGHTFUL & IMPORTANT CRITIQUE OF SLAVE SIMULATION GAME).

And Rusul Alrubail has talked about those same dangers related to refugee simulations (see CHOOSE YOUR OWN “ADVENTURE” AS A SYRIAN REFUGEE).

Today, The NY Times ran a column discussing an awful “choose your own adventure” game set in the Afghanistan War – see My Deployment Was Not an ‘Adventure,’ as a Children’s Book Tried to Tell My Daughters.

Here’s an excerpt:

Choose Your Own Adventure stories have their place, but also have to be kept in their place…