Choose-your-own-adventure books made reading into play: pick a path, turn the page, and see what changed. The early web carried the same spirit. People linked pages, built small worlds, and invented the rules as they went.
HyperCard predated the public web and gave people a simple way to link cards, add buttons, write scripts, and build interactive worlds. It was a mix of pages, saved state, and play.
Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson did something similar in fiction. They imagined machine minds, virtual spaces, networked societies, and software-shaped culture decades before they became ordinary. The choices do not repeat. Each one opens the story further, mixing names and concepts from the worlds they created.
Each load shuffles the content into a new run of dropdowns. We keep your choices in the order you make them, then build them into a stack of cards.
Each card gets an image by comparing the choice's subject and tags with the roles and tags attached to the Art Bits archive. The closest matches win. A fixed seed breaks ties, so a finished stack can be reproduced. Everything happens in the browser.
The pictures come from Apple's HyperCard Art Bits stack, preserved through theArt Bits archive. This local corpus remains rights-unverified and is not ready for public deployment.