This take on interactive fiction uses the familiar theme of Choose Your Own Adventure(tm?) style novels. However, Absurd Hero Interactive Diction are simply cards that determine your fate through limiting possibilities much the same as Meursault passively allowed others to determine his actions.

Your AHID adventure begins when you draw the first card from the pack that resembles a carton of cigarettes. The first options are 1. Kill yourself. 2. Do nothing. Once this most important of decisions has been made the adventure has either begun or ended. If it has ended hopefully there is a God and afterlife or everything heretofore had been meaningless including your death, for you there is no need for a next card, goodbye. If it hasn't ended, the next card reads "congratulations, have another cigarette, your adventure to become an absurd hero has begun".

As the game progresses and the carton is emptied of its contents the absurd adventurer can become one of many character classes including the don Juan, the adventurer, the revolutionary and the explorer. Although these intended character types seem attractive the absurd hero must tread with caution or become the dreaded sociopath, mental patient, criminal, or worse!
-- rcarty, Sep 23 2011

Wikipedia: The Dice Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man
A book that seems to do what's suggested, only with dice, and not cigarettes. [zen_tom, Sep 26 2011]

//the absurd hero must tread with caution//

Wait - how does that work? Once he's sensible enough to be cautious, he's lost the whole "absurd" thing.
-- pertinax, Sep 26 2011


Based on my limited knowledge of existentialism[*], this sounds a bit existentialist.

[*] I know the lyrics to The Cure's "Killing an Arab"
-- hippo, Sep 26 2011


Eh?

Don't you need to do more than just smoke cigarettes to become an absurd hero? - isn't the very idea of an absurd hero meaningless?

But if there is such a thing as an absurdist hero, mightn't that crown be already taken by Luke Rhinehart (The Dice Man)?

What's the difference between the dicelife and the idea presented here?
-- zen_tom, Sep 26 2011


No dice are mentioned in this idea.
-- rcarty, Sep 26 2011


Heh, no - but the idea of having a limited set of choices, that the "player" must surrender to following is very much the same. As is the "absurd" element, which presumably, based on your invocation of Meursault, suggests some kind of philosophical slant. While Camus is more "classically" linked to absurdism, Rhinehart is a much better proponent, if for no other reason than his characters have more fun.
-- zen_tom, Sep 26 2011


His idea is [m-f-d] because dice are widely known to exist. Absurd Hero Interactive Diction did not exist until now. I had no idea what it was, did you?
-- rcarty, Sep 26 2011


That's just absurd (ho ho?). Well played Captain. Pass the Penguins. Who's idea? And I still don't really know what it is - hence the questions. Mammoth. I don't really get it.
-- zen_tom, Sep 26 2011


Basically I had this information about absurd heroes and didn't know what to do with it so I made it into an invention. Yes it's a lot like the Dice Man, but that book really isn't that original he basically picks up on the logic of Foucault about rationality as madness and historical contingency and all that. Quite simply this idea is an aid for people wanting to become an absurd hero but don't know where to start.
-- rcarty, Sep 26 2011



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