Earlier this week, I finally crossed a title I’d been meaning to get to for a while now off of my reading list: Recent Hugo winner Star Trek: Lower Decks—Warp Your Own Way. (“A book?” you ask, horror in your voice. “But this is a games column!” Read on, dear reader, read on.) I’m undeniably tardy here, since the standalone graphic novel was published nearly a year ago. But WYOW had a few strikes against me getting to it any sooner. First and foremost, that I’m not an especially big fan of the source material: Lower Decks, which wrapped up its five-season run late last year, was a fun exercise in goofing around with Star Trek lore. But it also frequently felt too trapped between respect and subversion to get meaningful with its satire; it’s hard to make fun of Starfleet and embrace its basic vibe of futuristic optimism. So, why (eventually) pick up a book based on its characters? Easy: I’m a sucker for gamebooks, and especially gamebooks written by Lower Decks comic writer Ryan North.
North, I suspect, shares my heartfelt devotion to the gamebook form (which can vary in intensity from fairly straightforward stuff, like the officially branded Choose Your Own Adventure titles everybody read as kids, up through complicated text-based RPGs that require paper-and-pencil to keep track of the player’s progress). Several years back, he wrote a series of “Chooseable-Path Adventures” based on the works of William Shakespeare that are, to my mind, some of the finest work anyone’s ever done with the playable book form. (I’m very fond of the bit in his Hamlet-adjacent To Be Or Not To Be, for instance, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father can realize revenge is way more boring than using the eternal existence/basic invulnerability of being dead to do neat stuff, and uses his ghostly existence to become the world’s greatest oceanographer.) As anyone who’s lost a day to reading Dinosaur Comics knows, North is a master of the odd digression, and the ability to wrench the story in an odd direction for no other reason than pure amusement plays strongly to his strengths as a writer. At the same time, he’s got enough of a puzzle brain to want to build little meta-twists into the form, too. (To Be Or Not To Be, for instance, has a CYOA-game-inside-a-CYOA-game, in order to mimic Shakespeare’s famed “play within a play.”) The promise of North writing a gamebook was all I really needed to eventually read Warp Your Own Way; whether I loved the character of Starfleet screw-up-but-trying Beckett Mariner or not, I knew the title would have a lot to offer me as an inveterate gamebook nerd.
I was happily unsurprised by the result. Not only did North (working with illustrator Chris Fenoglio, colorist Charlie Kirchoff, and letterer Jeff Eckleberry) find a plot conceit (which I won’t spoil here) that allowed him to jam an improbably wide array of classic Star Trek threats into a single story, but I was also struck by how elegantly the book itself was constructed. Readers/players in Warp Your Own Way will typically move through a series of informal acts, reflecting their increasing understanding of why the USS Cerritos seems to keep getting itself blown up in each wildly diverse path, based on decisions as tiny as what Mariner drinks with her breakfast. Arranging the book’s pages to keep these sections (roughly) together not only cuts down on spoilers for later twists, but also deals with one of the weird little problems that can crop up in a gamebook like this: The distracting glimpses of other pages/choices that you get while trying to focus on the one you’ve actually flipped to. Because North knows that the reader is steadily closing in on the book’s first big twist—and has probably guessed it extremely early on—though, these glimpses of alternate possibilities come off less like traditional spoilers, and more as tantalizing glimpses of alternate possibilities. (“What the hell is Khan doing there?” “What’s with all the space gods?” “Was that a Borg?!”) The structure of the book itself bleeds into the reading experience, in a way that reminded me of Jason Shiga’s groundbreaking “choose your own path” graphic novel Meanwhile. (Although North isn’t interested in taking things nearly as cosmic, or as dark, as Shiga did with his 2011 work.) Later on, as the pagecount diminishes, you find yourself flipping back and forth between smaller sections, and more second-to-second choices; it’s an incredibly clever way to incorporate a physical element of page-turning into the book’s pacing. (I told you I was a nerd for gamebooks, right?)
All of this formal coolness is in addition to North’s typically excellent joke-writing, which cheerfully pokes fun at both Star Trek and CYOA conventions. If I have a critique of Warp Your Own Way, then, it’s simply that it isn’t as robust as I’d like as a game—mostly a consequence of its fairly limited 200-page page count. North and his team pull a few clever tricks with their overall structure, most notably requiring the reader to find a few unmarked decision points to progress to the next “act.” But the actual flow-chart of the book is fairly simple, both by design and necessity, and finding the path to the book’s “true ending” is an extremely simple affair. As I said, there’s a lot of variance in how far gamebooks can go with this kind of thing. (Contrast Warp Your Own Way with Sorcery!, which is now actually easiest to play as a computer game, or Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf books.) But part of the fun of choosing your own adventure is at least faking the sensation that your choices might actually matter, that picking a path is about more than simply exhausting text prompts (carefully keeping your pinky holding the book open to the previous one in case you chose a dead end, of course). Warp Your Own Way is a fun, smart, funny story, and a breezy, enjoyable read. But I don’t think I can be blamed for wanting more of an adventure from my Choose Your Own Adventure books.
