Book Idea: Cogite Ergo Sum

 I've been thinking: What if you made a book that pretends to be a chatbot that pretends to be sentient? Could one do that? I mean, you can have computation of sorts by making a choose-your-own-adventure and have the reader do some of the lifting by following instructions to find certain pages. Then you can add a couple of bits of RAM/Memory like I did with Der Dornengarten. Can you make a book that pretends to have a conversation with the reader, arguing for its own sentience, perhaps even be convincing in it? I'll have to ask a friend who studied philosophy what the killer arguments would be and then make up ways to have them flow into a conversation where one side can only pick out of multiple-choice answers like they're playing a video game. It's just an idea but what if...

Crafting: Der Dornengarten/The Thorn Garden

This game book has been in the making for a looong time. I had written most of the pages quite a while ago but this summer I went and did the drudgery of randomizing the page numbers and still keeping the page jumps intact. I have yet to give the book a true and serious look in order to make sure that there are not errors of style or numbering. Still I'm pround of what I made there:

The book is a non-linear fairy tale. It's basically a classic choose-your-own-adventure but it has a twist: On the inside of the cover, there are markings with letters and numbers that you can mark with paper clips. That way, the book essentially gets RAM:

This means, the book can remember things and have them be obscure to the player/reader at the same time. The thing is: The maze this story takes place in, is different every time you read it. In order to make that work, I needed to craft some tools before writing the actual text:

Every time you read this book, you will need to find a new way through the maze and will encounter other characters and have different conversations. And your decisions matter. At the same time, you can always retrace your steps and the whole thing stays consistent in its topography. I'm quite proud of that working and in theory one could take the structure and put other stories into it, now that the base work has been done. I'm planning on pitching this to a publisher some day.