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Contemporary risk society has caused many creative practitioners to question the role, effect, and potential of their practice. In seeking to find a means by which creative writing can do something in the real world, this article examines the use of directive speech acts-such as commands, requests, and invitations-in print and digital branching narratives and choose-your-own-adventure texts. I focus on The Throne of Zeus, Depression Quest, and Queers in Love at the End of the World, investigating both standard directives and what I classify as 'latent' directives: commands 'hidden' within the text, taking forms such as styled hyperlinks and typographical notes and citations. Deploying Aarseth's definitions of ergodic literature, DelConte's concept of partially-coincident narration, and Juul's ludological theory of the half-real, I find that the directives featured in these texts step beyond their fictional context, operating as true speech acts within our stretched-out present and collapsed temporal horizon, thereby strengthening the texts' overall illocutionary goal. These texts speak to and of the precarity of our present time, embodying-and allowing a reader to embody-lived experiences of extended nows, and allowing us to take control in acting towards a present-to-be.

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