Can you play a book?
The novel has never sat still. The concept of a sustained piece of narrative fiction goes back at least to the 1st century BC in Ancient Greece but would be developed independently across Europe and Asia over centuries. Technological developments like Gutenberg’s printing press in the west, and the rapidly expanding market for books in the 18th century would also influence how novels were written, and who they were written for. Today fiction is a massive global industry that caters to just about every kind of reader, as well as plenty who would not call themselves readers.
It’s easy to forget that novels weren’t always designed for entertainment purposes — posterity, didacticism and morality are a few notable purposes of premodern literature. Yet even as audiences expanded with the production of cheap paperbacks in the first half of the 20th century, there was never a lack of will to experiment from the perspective of writers. From modernist to postmodernist literature, philosophical fiction, speculative fiction and autofiction, adventurous readers have always been satiated.
Which brings us to ergodic literature, yet another attempt to pull the novel apart and rearrange it. The term was first used in 1997 by video game academic Espen J. Aarseth, to describe stories in which the reader is an active participant, or which include specific rules the reader must follow. A work is ergodic when ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’ — in other words, when the reader is required to do something beyond the culturally implicit instructions of reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom and front-to-back. He used this term in the context of a book about ‘digital literature’, however, the broadness of this definition encompasses numerous physical books, such as the ancient divination text, I-Ching. Ergodic literature might involve moving back and forth between pages, reading the book in different orientations or meeting some other real-world conditions.
Because of the diversity of art available to us and the cross-pollination between forms, there is now a greater open-mindedness towards what a novel can be. At the same time, the fact that the novel is facing so much competition has forced it further into a niche, which is supported by readers who see books as a escape from everything else. But is there something to be said for analogue interactivity?
Writing outside of the box
A famous example of a metatextual ergodic novel is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which consists of a long poem by a fictional author, and a commentary by an obsessive scholar. While the reader themselves isn’t influencing the outcome of the story, this nonlinearity creates a unique relationship between the reader and author. As we flip between the poem and the commentary, we have to wonder at what level of the text is the story being created — is the poem the story? Is the commentary the story? Or is the subtext that ties the two together the story?
Sometimes the ergodic element takes on a secondary role. Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is a strange story on its own, yet it gains an extra dimension with its inclusion of fake academic footnotes. Footnotes are usually for references or explanations that the author doesn’t want to get in the way of the text, but in O’Brien’s case, it’s a sly way to set up a parallel story with an extremely funny and bizarre pay-off. In this example the reader doesn’t technically need to read the footnotes to understand the narration, but in doing so they are rewarded with an additional layer of humour.
While the Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo is not technically ergodic, its author George Saunders uses a language layout very unusual for prose fiction. Dialogue is denoted by character tags, in a similar way to a film script, to create the impression of an immaterial environment without a narrator; in another twist on convention, he uses a rabble of academic quotations to describe scenes on earth. Rather than being distracting, the effect creates immersion.
Understandably, writers might be frustrated with the limitations of the novel in an age where the most popular entertainment is highly sensorial. How could a paperback thriller compete with a Christopher Nolan film? Perhaps it can’t — but it doesn’t matter. Books are uniquely appealing because they create an intimate relationship with the reader. Novels are far more subjective than films, relying on the audience interpreting the text. Multiple readings can leave readers with different impressions, which may be influenced as well by how they’re feeling at the time. Novels can come to feel like they were specifically created for us, and we inhabit them.
There’s a case to be made that books are already an interactive medium, but that their appeal lies in the openness of the interactivity. As soon as authors start telling readers how to read their books (and how to feel) the possibilities for interpretation are limited — there’s a reason the 2nd person isn’t very common in narrative fiction. Even if the ergodicity is purely aesthetic, doesn’t it just get in the way of interpretation rather than enhancing it?
Play on, words
Nobody would argue this was the case for video games, which usually rely on a visual language to tell the story — assuming they have one. Text-based games have existed since the 1960s, the 1971 computer game The Oregon Trail being one example. While sophisticated graphics may have put this genre out of fashion, the concept of a text-heavy game with multiple narrative choices has persisted. Arguably games like Disco Elysium or Return of the Obra Dinn have a level of narrative depth comparable to novels, even if structurally they are far more complicated.
Whether or not a video game can be a work of literature is a far less stupid question than it sounds. Literature is not restricted by the material it appears on, clearly; it predates the invention of paper, and some forms of literature are entirely oral — this is to say nothing of the more recent invention of audiobooks, which understandably don’t market themselves as an entirely different form. Games like Disco Elysium, which contains over 1,000,000 words of dialogue, all of which can be read, muddy the waters further. But perhaps this points to the fact that video games are too broad a category to be considered an art form in the same way as literature, films and visual arts are — note how literature stems from writing, but not every kind of writing is literature. Perhaps as video games become an ever more ubiquitous art form, we will find subcategories such as ‘interactive story’ to be just as important as the umbrella term ‘video game’.
The inverse question is: are works of ergodic literature examples of an interactive medium, since they require the reader to make decisions? One argument against this is that the level of interactivity afforded to the reader of a book format will always be very restricted. No matter how you read a book, and how long the book is, it will consist of a relatively small amount of data, being mainly text. The level of interactivity is also entirely dependent on the reader, whereas even a basic video game will involve a program facilitating the interactivity between the player and the game. Even if interactivity is just an illusion, the difference between the rudimentary level of input a reader can have with an ergodic book, and the complex systems of input and response in a video game are significant.
Seen this way, the perks of ergodic literature are probably not in the level of autonomy they give the reader. It’s clear, for example, that multiple endings have not become a common convention in literature just because video games have suggested new possibilities for branching storylines.
The ability to choose the order of chapters in a segment of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Spanish: Rayuela) might be a break from linearity, but doesn’t really change the relationship between the author and the reader. These ‘expendable chapters’ intend to answer some of the questions posed by the main story, however the sense of power this gives the reader has less to do with the order they choose to assimilate the information than the information itself. In other words, what did the additional layer of decision-making add to the experience? This novel, which far predates narrative video-games, might not make a case for ergodicity but is a least an interesting philosophical experiment in form. One of the key features of novels is narrative structure, the framework that makes a story compelling to read from start to finish. Yet, structure does not need to be prescriptive — conventions such as single narrators, chapters and the Aristotelian unities have all been successfully ditched.
Holistic reading
Like any form, novels are not entirely self-contained: they depend on an understanding of language, culture and conventions that reside outside of the text. Ergodic literature distinguishes itself by creating additional rules for participating in the text, however these aren’t literary rules — as Aarsen notes, ergodic literature is not a genre, since works ‘do not share an obvious unity of aesthetics, thematics, literary history, or even material technology’.
However, ergodic literature, as well as video-games, might still point towards new ways of engaging with conventionally formatted texts, and remind us that reading is not a linear process to begin with. I often find myself reaching for my phone to look up place names I find in novels and specific terms and words I’m unfamiliar with. Technology may be a distraction, but it can enhance the text, and sometimes it’s necessary because of time and cultural barriers between the text and the reader. Moby Dick often had me making liberal use of the reference section at the back of the book; this might be a concession for classics, but in this case, it was very fitting since Herman Melville’s opus draws on such a diverse range of sources that, even for his time, readers would be unable to grasp all of the allusions. Translated literature often contains cultural differences that need to be explained for the reader to fully appreciate the work — however, the translated work will always have the imprint of the translator. It’s possible to imagine a work of ergodic literature where the readers themselves assumes some responsibility for the translation.
Literature will take undoubtedly on new shapes in the future, just as society and culture change. If digital formats become the standard, it’s easy to imagine novels gaining more interactive elements, such as hyperlinks on character names that help you keep track of their histories, or the seamless integration of other data such as maps, photographs and documents. Things we consider innovations now could become standard features. Over millennia we might even evolve beyond the physical act of reading.
As it stands, ergodic literature is an interesting reminder of the limits of novels, and why they don’t necessarily need to be transgressed.
