Aarseth’s Ergodic Theory by Kayleigh Kember

AARSETH’S ERGODIC THEORY

by Kayleigh Kember

Aarseth’s 1997 text Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature introduces a new concept to the discourse of new media and its effects on literature. Appropriated from physics, Aarseth uses the term ergodic to describe texts that require a reader to perform nontrivial effort when reading them. Throughout his analysis he uses the term cybertext to identify the kinds of texts that he is assessing, indicating that their commonality is not technological but dynamic texts with “a principle of calculated production.” A physical game is an example of what Aarseth would call a fully ergodic experience with no literary elements. What he is interested in is the techniques that are employed and the places where the two – game and literary work – merge. This essay will be using a textual game and a novel in order to discuss the fundamental principles of ergodic literature, as well as related textual and structural techniques. The Walking Dead (Vanaman, Darin, Whitta, 2012) is a critically acclaimed narrative game based on a graphic novel and television show of the same title, though focusing on a different narrative within the same post-apocalyptic setting. It tells the story of Lee, his journey for survival in this setting and the choices that must be made along the way. The game is very different to other zombie games as it focuses less on the horror and action aspects and instead players must concentrate on forming relationships with other characters by modifying their responses to the scenarios presented. This focus on narrative above action as well as the textual elements within gameplay, reminiscent of early text adventures, are what makes this game suitable for analysis via Aarseth’s ergodic theory. House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000) is a multi-narrative novel including transcripts from a fictional film, The Navidson Record, an analysis of this film by a character Zampanò, an investigation of Zampanò’s text by Truant with autobiographical passages, as well as notes by unidentified editors, complete with footnotes and references to both real and fictional critical

works. As well as this complicated narrative, House of Leaves is presented in a unique codex format, including multiple fonts to differentiate between narrators and blank pages with unusual typography and layout. The novel’s physical format and narrative style make analysis in light of ergodic theory particularly useful. The first adventure games were more textual in content. As Aarseth points out game developers had to conceive of the many ways in which players may respond to the game to come up with suitable consequences for player actions. Though these games were able to respond with error messages or incomprehension messages, there were still a number of actions that players could make, and with source code provided they were even able to modify the game to their tastes. Technology has become more complicated in the thirty or so successive years, and gaming, like much of the media, has become more dependent on visuals. The Walking Dead combines the newer filmic quality of video games with some text adventure game qualities. The Walking Dead is based on a graphic novel already adapted into a TV show so, like the 1984 The Hitchhikers Guideto the Galaxy adventure game, it had a market to draw upon. However, unlike that game, it created a narrative in the same imaginative world of the original while creating new characters and stories so that gamers were given a new narrative of their own. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy game was text-based so players relied heavily on their knowledge of the original novel to navigate their way through the game. The visuals of The Walking Dead are also a remediation of its comic book parent, reinforcing its literary heritage and stylistic qualities while adapting the adventure game to the modern canon of video games. In The Walking Dead the player only encounters choices at certain times (although these occur at regular intervals), and these choices are limited to four possible responses. These choices are different to those offered in most videogames as they are displayed textually and create moral and ethical decisions as well as plot decisions. The gaming nature of these choices is maintained by their puzzle-like quality, as the player must decode the implications and possible outcomes of all the choices provided as well as their personal preference, all within a limited time.

Aarseth creates another term to describe the element within cybertext that motivates the plot – intrigue – and differentiates two types of intrigue: dramatic and ergodic. He defines dramatic intrigue as “plot within the plot, usually, with the audience’s full knowledge” and ergodic intrigue as “against the user…[with] more than one explicit outcome” Both The Walking Dead

and House of Leaves problematise this concept in different ways. As a textual game The Walking Dead would seemingly best fit into the category of ergodic intrigue. This is because the The Walking Dead contains puzzles that the player is not complicit in and must solve to progress; the consequences of not solving these puzzles can be death. However, many of the motivational elements within the game have a limited amount of outcomes, potentially changing other character’s responses and the help they offer but not changing any of the major plot events. For example in series 2 Episode 1 “All that remains”, the player must choose to save either Nick or Pete. If you save Pete he dies anyway in the next episode, “A House Divided”. He would die either way but other characters have differing reactions depending on whom you decide to save. House of Leaves as a codex experience provides the reader with static text, unable to respond to each reader individually. However, its multiple and self-referential narratives provide paths that the reader can choose to explore either in tandem or one at a time or one but not the other. Consequently the reader may be denied “full knowledge” of the narratives depending on what choices they make. Though House of Leaves can in a limited way create ergodic intrigue through its multiple narratives, Aarseth claims that ergodic intrigue is ultimately experienced by a “transcendental figure”, as the character, narratee and player all merge into one identity but are affected to different degrees by the intrigue. For example, Lee the character may die during a failed intrigue. The narratee (player) is then informed that they may restart allowing them to assess what went wrong and how they may do it differently next time. This is a particularly ergodic process as the player must put in nontrivial effort in order to assess the various actions and effects, while being forced into replaying until they resolve the intrigue correctly. House of Leaves may be able to force the reader into rereading as they attempt to find meaning and connection between different passages, but they must always remain as a reader outside of the text.

Aarseth’s definition of an ergodic text is the requirement of the reader to partake in nontrivial effort in order to navigate a text. Aarseth describes nontrivial effort in contrast to trivial effort such as eye-movement and page-turning and states that it must provoke “extranoematic” senses. These are certainly elements of both narratives. Structurally the gaming aspect of The Walking Dead make this a necessity as players must use a controller to move Lee throughout the environment and click on items of interest in

order to interact with them, as well as pressing buttons to respond to the various choices presented throughout the game. House of Leaves also creates this nontrivial experience using the physical qualities of the codex. The layout of the text shifts and requires readers to physically turn the book in order to read upside-down, reversed and diagonal text. “As an artifact, the book becomes the labyrinth, and as readers progress through it, they must flip forward and back and turn the book in every possible direction to read the text.” This physicality is further reinforced with the use of media-specific tools. In House of Leaves Danielewski makes use of footnotes, typeface and colour to add another dimension that readers must interpret and engage with along with the layout of his pages.

The physical way in which these narratives prompt ergodic movement throughout the text is rather palpable, however both narratives also use other techniques in order to prompt this. Aarseth’s theory of ergodic uses terms like paths and traverse to describe a reader’s movement through text and these narratives literally provide readers with a choice of paths to move through them. House of Leaves does this through the interweaving of the various narratives. Readers must choose between reading the text in page order, following a particular narrative from beginning to end, or following the paths that the footnotes send the reader down. The latter two options are arguably more ergodic methods of traversing House of leaves as the reader will be continually forced to go back and forth through the text to search for and complete relevant passages to then find their way back to the prompting text. Though The Walking Dead offers its players various in-game choices, once a decision is made the narrative follows a linear passage and there is no need or opportunity for a player to travel back and forth (though if a player makes a bad decision Lee may die and they will be forced to replay that section).

The narrator can be used as an ergodic tool troubling the narrative, as we see most overtly in House of Leaves’ presentation of three different narrators. For example footnote 165 states, “Mr. Truant refused to reveal whether the following bizarre textual layout is Zampanò’s or his own. –Ed” The text itself is drawing attention to the competing narratives and the ambiguity of the information provided. However, Aarseth mostly applies this idea of the narrator to text adventure games stating that the narrator or ‘voice’ becomes an “opponent and ally at the same time”. The Walking Dead operates in a slightly different way to this, because unlike the original adventure games it

relies heavily on its visuals to inform the reader; instead of a narrator mediating the story the player has a much more immediate experience within the game universe.

Aarseth states: “when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard”. However, Aarseth then goes on to say that the full consequences of a reader’s choices cannot be fully understood, because the reading experience changes each time. However, House of Leaves does not adhere to this phenomenon, as a printed text the choices of House of Leaves are mapped and static and so consequently choices and results can be more clearly understood. For example the footnotes give the reader a choice to keep reading or examine the chapter first. The Walking Dead on the other hand is a much more successful model of this – every choice branch the player is presented with shows other paths that could be taken, constantly reminding the player of other options available to them. After some choices a caption appears at the top of the screen stating that other characters have noted their choice, for example “Kenny will remember that” (Season one, episode two, 2012). This serves the dual purpose of reminding the player that their actions have repercussions and also suggesting other choices may make Kenny behave in a different way without actually informing the reader of what the effects may be. The Walking Dead also has a unique element whereby at the end of each episode players are provided with a page of decision statistics that allow them to compare their choices with those of other players: “Did you kill the boy in the attic?… You and 25% of players did not kill him”. This further reinforces “paths not taken” as players are shown the potential paths and occasionally the consequences of your own choices. For example in one decision statistic players are shown how many of the characters joined them on a particular mission. Seeing the different variations shows a player that other choices and paths may have given them more allies and support within the game. However, they are not told which choices led to this result and so the full consequences of their actions and the details of other paths are obscured. This is linked to interactivity and can encourage multiple playthroughs.

Aarseth destabilises the critical use of the term interactive. If the reader must have some creative licence/control in order to be interactive, then can this term be applied successfully to any of the texts explored here? The player of The Walking Dead is given this level of control over their

experience as they explore the environment of the game by literally moving Lee around and clicking on objects that they want him to examine or collect. This makes The Walking Dead feel more interactive than House of Leaves because it is apparently shaped by the player’s choices, whereas with House of Leaves being printed the choices made by the reader only affect their experience of the text and not the outcome of the text itself. However, deciding what path to follow in House of Leaves may affect the understanding of certain passages and ultimately The Walking Dead ends the same no matter how it is played. Though readers are certainly given choices they must follow a creator’s map; just as in a maze you are free to explore but must follow the paths created and laid out before you. As Aarseth states, in the myth of Theseus Daedalus created a maze so complicated that he could not find the way out, but it was designed and made static. The fictional maze within House of Leaves is associated in Zampanò’s theory with a reflection of the self: “Due to the wall-shifts and extraordinary size, any way out remains singular and applicable only to those on that path at that particular time. All solutions then are necessarily personal.” Ergodic texts leave the creation of meaning and the ending of the tale ultimately up to the reader. The ‘solution’ to the Navidsons’ maze is perhaps the closest that we get to a true level of interactivity, but this cannot be replicated, as of yet, by any media experience. This is made evident in Aarseth’s discussion of Afternoon: A Story when he comments, “[Afternoon] quickly turns into a dense, multicursal labyrinth, and the reader becomes not so much lost as caught, imprisoned by the repeating, circular paths and his own impotent choices”. Both The Walking Dead and House of Leaves give their audience control of their own path to take through the text, this is essentially what makes them ergodic. However, readers are offered only different routes to limited actions and conclusions. The critic Richardson comments on this in relation to The Walking Dead: “It’s a given that some aspects of the plot are uncontrollable, certain choices aren’t choices at all – they’re set paths that you feel in control of when you’re not, but then, that can sometimes be a part of life too and it’s crucial in driving this remarkable plot forward.” These texts are evoking the idea of agency within the changing paths similar to that inspired by the corridor in House of Leaves, although Richardson and Aarseth highlight the impotence of choices. The critic Grodal counters this in an essay on videogames stating, “Normally the options in stories are only virtual, even in the second reading or viewing, whereas a computer

story may be constructed in such a way that what was virtual in the first playing is chosen and actualised in the second.” The choices that Aarseth characterises as impotent become an integral part of the replay and rereading value that he describes as part of the ergodic text.

Finally a key characteristic of ergodic texts is their ability to push the reader outside of the text. The non-trivial effort that readers must use physically to traverse such texts is reinforced by any effort that they use outside of the text. Both texts use many methods to do this. House of Leaves is a multimedia experience, having both an album and a compilation of letters written to one of the in-text characters. This forces the reader outside of the text in search of such material as well creating an extranoematic experience of the text. Further, the critic Hemmingson highlights how Danielewski uses footnotes not only to create a physical ergodic effect of the reader traversing the text but also to push the reader outside of the text: “By using real publishing entities, such as Little Brown, for the fake books, Danielewski intentionally sends his readers on wild goose chases, to determine if these books are real or imagined.” In this way House of Leaves is able send readers into searches outside of the text looking for completed information or clarification of fiction and fact. House of Leaves is a blend of fiction and fact; this is one of the techniques that Danielewski uses to actively engage the reader. The Walking Dead also makes use of its medium to push the reader outside of the text. The game has been released on various platforms including computers, consoles and phones; the adaptability of the game allows gamers to play and discuss the game in various locations. The episodic nature of the game also allows opportunities for the reader to discuss the game between episodes, and the decision statistics further prompt this by allowing players to see the popularity of their choice. Aarseth suggests that reader-response theories may not be enough to understand the pressure that ergodic texts place on the reader as even with these theories “The performance of their reader takes place all in his head”, whereas an ergodic text is defined by its ability to compel the reader to work outside of the mind. The choices that the player makes in The Walking Dead have a direct effect on how the characters in the game respond and help. The player is often placed in survival situations and moral dilemmas that other characters are witness to and become part of the comparison with other players at the end of the narrative. This means that the player’s actions can become manipulated by the fictional characters and fellow players, as the

player worries about the in-game consequences of their actions and their place with other players; just as House of Leaves pushes the reader out of the text to verify its sources and information and also its added content.

Aarseth’s theory is a discussion of the limits of these categories and the borders at which they merge and cross. He presents these categories as something unstable and therefore it becomes hard to assess the qualities within the text and the categories of the texts themselves. The highest level of ergodic appears to be achieved by text-based games and puzzles that require the reader to type, engage and problem solve. Next we have texts that require some physical effort to be traversed by the reader, and finally texts that just require eye-movement and occasional page turning/scrolling. The many forms of electronic and print media are able to transcend which ergodic category they fit into from text to text. Both of the texts studied can be described as ergodic but vary the techniques they use towards this effect and both challenge what is expected of their medium. The Walking Dead brings a literary level to videogames that is rarely seen while House of Leaves reaffirms the adaptability of the codex form. The ergodic process in art becomes a process of learning and adopting a new perspective to understand the work or ‘see’ what the artist is trying to show us.