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This article is about the literary neologism. For other uses, see Ergodic (disambiguation).

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Ergodic literature is a genre of literature in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text. The term was coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his 1997 book Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning "work", and hodos, meaning "path". It is associated with the concept of cybertext and describes a cybertextual process that includes a semiotic sequence that the concepts of "reading" do not account for.

Concept

Aarseth's book contains the most commonly cited definition of ergodic literature:

In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.

In addition to the above definition, Aarseth explained ergodic literature as two-fold: a normal text and a machine capable of producing several manifestations of a text. One of the major innovations of the concept of ergodic literature is that it is not medium-specific so long as the medium has the ability to produce an iteration of the text. New media researchers have tended to focus on the medium of the text, stressing that it is for instance paper-based or electronic. Aarseth broke with this basic assumption that the medium was the most important distinction, and argued that the mechanics of texts need not be medium-specific.

Ergodic literature is not defined by medium, but by the way in which the text functions. Thus, both paper-based and electronic texts can be ergodic: "The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users."

Cybertext

Main article: Cybertext

Cybertext is a subcategory of ergodic literature that Aarseth defines as "texts that involve calculation in their production of scriptons". The process of reading printed matter, in contrast, involves "trivial" extranoematic effort, that is, merely moving one's eyes along lines of text and turning pages. Thus, hypertext fiction of the simple node and link variety is ergodic literature but not cybertext. A non-trivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text, as the reader must constantly select which link to follow, but a link, when clicked, will always lead to the same node. A chat bot such as ELIZA is a cybertext because when the reader types in a sentence, the text-machine actually performs calculations on the fly that generate a textual response. The I Ching is likewise cited as an example of cybertext because it contains the rules for its own reading. The reader carries out the calculation but the rules are clearly embedded in the text itself.

It has been argued that these distinctions are not entirely clear and scholars still debate the fine points of the definitions.

The concepts of cybertext and ergodic literature were of seminal importance to new media studies, in particular literary approaches to digital texts and to game studies.

Examples

Aarseth gives two major lists of examples of ergodic literature throughout the work - first in the opening chapter, then in the third, where a possible typology is discussed. The major examples listed throughout the work include:

Examples given by Espen Aarseth

Title	Creator	Format or Description
(No specific example or location identified)	Ancient Egyptians	Stone wall inscriptions of the temples in ancient Egypt that are connected two-dimensionally (on one wall) or three dimensionally (from wall to wall or room to room).
afternoon: a story	Michael Joyce	Published by Eastgate Systems, it is one of the earliest examples of hypertext literature, alongside with Victory Garden,
Agrippa	William Gibson	A 300-line semi-autobiographical novel. It exists in two forms, either on a 3.5" floppy disk, where the text scrolls by automatically, and encrypts itself once it has passed, or as an artist's book, of which the pages have been treated with photosensitive chemicals, such that the first exposure to light would effect gradual fading.
Book Unbound	John Cayley	A "holographic sentence generator that merges and mutates other texts, inviting readers to feed their favorite results back into the system."
Calligrammes	Guillaume Apollinaire	A collection of poems, which "fork out on the page" - the "words and sentences on [the] page page are spread out in many directions," and invite "linking/jumping.", with no clear right sequence. It can be considered alternatively an example of concrete or visual poetry.
Cent mille milliards de poèmes	Raymond Queneau	A set of ten poems, printed on card with each line on a separate strip. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, allowing for 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems.
Colossal Cave Adventure	William Crowther & Don Woods	A text-based adventure game, where the player interacts with locations and objects via simple word prompts, interpreted by the game's natural language input system.
Composition No. 1, Roman	Marc Saporta	The historically first "book in a box," consisting of a bundle of pages that can be shuffled and read in any order. Conceptually similar to B. S. Johnson's (1969) The Unfortunates, which consists of 27 unbound "sections" of varying lengths, with only the first and last specified as such.
ELIZA	Joseph Weizenbaum	An early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at MIT.
Falcon 5: The Dying Sun	Mark Smith & Jamie Thomson	A game book, similar to The Money Spider. Differs from it in that it adds dice-rolling as a mechanic, and thus a degree of indeterminacy.
Hopscotch	Julio Cortázar	A stream-of-consciousness novel which can be read either linearly, or according to an alternative chapter order listed at the start.
I Am Awake at the Place Where Women Die	Jenny Holzer	A temporary LED installation, wherein a "linear electronic text [...] endlessly repeats its sort, painful messages."
The I Ching	China, as old as 900 BCE	A divination text in which bundles of yarrow stalks are arranged to form numbers.
The Money Spider	Robin Waterfield & Wilfred Davies	A "typical gamebook in which the reader must solve a puzzle by choosing the right path through the many fragments of the text."
MUD1	Richard Bartle & Roy Trubshaw	The first multi-user dungeon, a text-based multiplayer real-time virtual world.
Night of January 16th	Ayn Rand	A play about a trial, where "members of the audience are picked to be the jury," with two possible endings depending on their verdict.
Norisbo	Randi Strand	An artist's book, which "folds from all four sides, so the reader reads a unique sequence folded by the last reader and then folds the pages to leave a unique combination for the next reader."
Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov	A novel consisting of a 999-line unfinished poem in four cantos, written by John Shade, and a pseudo-academic analysis by his neighbour and university colleague Charles Kinbote, where the majority of the book's "plot" is situated, and an index. Aarseth notes that it "can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem."
Racter	William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter	An artificial intelligence program that generates English language prose at random.
Tale-spin	James Meehan	A program which generates "simple animal fables of the ?sop type," with varying success.
TinyMUD	James Aspnes	A further example of a multi-user dungeon. Builds upon MUD1's model in that it allows for user-generated dungeons.
Twin Kingdom Valley	Trevor Hall	An example of a "more flexible adventure game," building upon Colossal Cave Adventure's model.
Unending Addventure	Allen S. Firstenberg	An example of hypertext collaborative fiction, wherein users can add notes at the ends of the branches.
Victory Garden	Stuart Moulthrop	One of the earliest examples of hypertext literature, along with Michael Joyce's Afternoon.

There are still further examples worth considering, however, especially ones that came out after Cybertext's release, or were simply too obscure or glanced over at the time of release. Such include:

Further examples of ergodic fiction

Title	Creator	Format or description
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors	Kotaru Uchikoshi	A Japanese adventure game on the Nintendo DS which is told through two simultaneous perspectives, each displayed on a separate screen
A Thousand Plateaus	Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari	"A Thousand Plateaus is written as a 'rhizome,' that is, as allowing immediate connections between any of its points. Because of this rhizomatic structure, a traditional summary of the 'theses' and arguments of A Thousand Plateaus is either downright impossible, or at best, would be much too complex to attempt in an encyclopedia article."
Avalovara	Osman Lins	A stream-of-consciousness novel containing riddles, puzzles, anagrams, palindromes, and a considerable amount of word play.
Bottom's Dream	Arno Schmidt	A novel, published in folio format with 1,334 pages, told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of notes, collages, and typewritten pages.
Building Stories	Chris Ware	A graphic novel presented as fourteen separate works packaged within a box. Each component work has a distinct presentation—including a mock Little Golden Book, newspaper, broadsheet and flip book—and can be read in any order.
Choose Your Own Adventure	Edward Packard	A set of children's novels written in the second person in which the reader makes choices throughout, leading to a number of different possible endings
Dictionary of the Khazars	Milorad Pavi?	Three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias, sometimes contradicting each other, each compiled from the sources of one of the major Abrahamic religions. Additionally, a ballet adaption was staged at Madlenianum Opera and Theatre.
Landscape Painted with Tea	Milorad Pavi?	Described as "A novel for crossword fans."
House of Leaves	Mark Z. Danielewski	A novel with a very unusual layout, presented as a story about a manuscript about a movie about a house that is larger on the inside than the outside.
Life: A User's Manual	Georges Perec	A “series of novels” that can be read both linearly and non-linearly by navigating through an index of characters and stories, which Perec thought of as hypertext links.
Six Sex Scenes	Adrienne Eisen	Hypertext fiction that allows the reader to choose storylines throughout.
S.	J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst	Composed of the novel Ship of Theseus (by the fictional V. M. Straka), hand-written notes filling the book's margins, and supplementary material loosely inserted between the pages.
The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy	Nick Bantock	Three stories, told through a series of letters and postcards between the two main characters. Every page features a postcard or a letter enclosed in an envelope.
XX	Rian Hughes	A science fiction novel told in part through ephemera such as declassified documents, artworks, graphics, and a novel within the novel

See also

• Aleatoric art
• Cybertext
• Digital poetry
• Electronic literature
• Fighting Fantasy
• Interactive fiction
• Rhizome
• Encyclopedic novel