Dave Gray | info

Hey Dave,

In the video, you mention that “You have to read a book in a linear form”. That’s only partially true. Sometimes it’s dependent on the book type…self-help, business and text books for example often get read in seemingly random orders (or at least in an order that may only make sense to the reader). In addition, there are a great series of books known as “choose your own adventure” books. These allow the reader to select from a non-linear story, or at least not a single one mandated by the author. These books became the basis of the early role playing games and branching dialogue engines in computer games. Many of the non-linear story techniques still exist in today’s most recent and popular video games like Mass Effect.

To be fair, the stories still end up being linear. They become linear as you, the reader, experience them. Jim Gee does a great job in his book “Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul” of talking about how the process of a non-linear (in his case, game) story combines the various possible non-linear experiences to create a completely unique linear story each time the game is played. So in a sense, the language, as experienced in your head, is still linear even though the options along the path to get there were non-linear.

So while linear (and non-linear) books can be experienced in a non-linear fashion, in the end, the experience of the reader is necessarily linear. How’s that for circular logic.

–tom