The rather esoteric-sounding concept “ergodic” was introduced into the context of new media studies by the theorist Espen Aarseth. In his influential book Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature he writes about ergodicity as a property of a text whose reading requires “nontrivial effort to traverse the text” (Aarseth 1997, p. 1). The author borrowed the term ergodic from physics, but since an etymological analysis reveals that ergon and hodos mean work and path respectively, it is not hard to understand why the term suits the demanding traversal of textual paths.
It is important to say that Aarseth regards cybertexts as the kind of texts that are read ergodically. The author is interested in the mechanics by which texts are constructed, and also in the different role of the user-reader, who plays a much more active part than in non-ergodic texts. The allusion to play is deliberate, because we can look at ergodic texts as labyrinths, the world of a certain game offering several possibilities (paths) for solving it. Aarseth writes that the user-reader can get lost in ergodic texts not just metaphorically, but in a purely practical sense, through the “topological structures of the textual machinery” (Aarseth 1997, p. 4).
Here, too, lies a large set of misunderstandings between Aarseth and literary critics, many of whom had trouble understanding how ergodic texts actually differ from, say, more complex or more demanding literature such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Beckett’s prose with its torn syntax, or T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. All the works mentioned clearly demand more mental effort from the reader than Pejsek a kočička, but we are still, according to Aarseth, on the level of the eyes moving from line to line. In other words, the author does not claim that the works mentioned cannot be so semantically dense that they can be interpreted in many ways (hence their difficulty), but the mechanics of reading is trivial. Which can lead to many paradoxes: if we take some text about Pejsek and Kočička, let ourselves be inspired by William Burroughs’ cut-up technique and cut the original text up into individual words, which we put into a little bag and hand to the reader with the cry: read!, at that moment reading this fairy tale becomes an ergodic text, since reading the fairy tale requires effort, in this case putting the text together from the cut-up words. Let us notice that the text has suddenly become a kind of “reservoir (matrix) from which a larger number of texts can be generated” (Ryan 2015, 245).
With McLuhan’s help we could say that Aarseth is in fact emphasising the importance of the medium through which we read the text — the logic and structure of the medium is inseparable from the text (the text is also a medium; we see that a medium always re-mediates another medium), from the message itself, so it holds that: the medium is the message.
In summary: the reader of a non-ergodic text is powerless, he has not been granted the author’s powers to manipulate the text, the text is rigidly linear, whereas ergodic literature is non-linear, and in many ways raises the reader to a creative, because he is asked to actively interact with the text, whether by selecting the individual paths along which the story will develop, or for the purpose of participating in the construction (production) of the making of the world.
An example of selective interactivity is hypertext adventures, where the game mechanism reacts to the user’s input (the decision which path to take), but the paths are defined in advance. An example of productive interactivity is the well-known game Minecraft, where the restrictions on what the player can do are minimal, and so the player takes a significant part in what the game is actually about: the player is not a passive recipient of content, but an active producer
Finally, we can divide ergodic texts into these categories: electronic/non-electronic, ergodic/non-ergodic, interactive/non-interactive.
An assignment for the seminar Foundations of New Media Studies
After a nice theoretical and philosophical introduction, in which we engaged the analytical parts of our brains, we were given the task of getting our rusty creative juices flowing a little. And how else than with the holy grail in the form of creating an electronic, ergodic and interactive text.
For this task there is a very handy open source program, Twine, which offers everything needed for creating interactive, non-linear (and so, in principle, ergodic) stories even to those who are not on friendly terms with HTML and Javascript.
A look at the Twine program
Before you start writing your own stories, have a look at what a possible output from Twine (aka my short story) looks like
Hypertext short story The Ship
You can download Twine at: http://twinery.org/.
Sources:
AARSETH, Espen. Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, c1997. ISBN 0-8018-5579-9.
RYAN, Marie-Laure. Narativ jako virtuální realita: imerze a interaktivita v literatuře a elektronických médiích. 1st edition. Translated by Eva Krásová. Praha: Academia, 2015. Možné světy. ISBN 978-80-200-2507-4.