Ergodic Literature (opens in new tab)

In the digital realm, MS Paint Adventures [1] and 17776 [2] spring to mind as modern ergodic literature. The old Homestar Runner [3] had a few really memorable moments that spring to mind, like a couple of gimmicks for SB Email #100 (a fake 404 page with an animation rewarding impatient fans who tried the /100.html URI before the update went up as well as the perfectly executed smooth aspect ratio change mid-animation.)

  1. https://www.mspaintadventures.com
  2. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
  3. https://www.homestarrunner.com

I'm currently reading theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh [1] which also fits this category. It's full of transcripts of calls, frames of film, email threads, redacted pages, news articles. Highly recommend it, it's so nice to be surprised by what you find every other page-turn.

I follow a guy Wildbow who writes webserials who also occasionally dives into this, like for example this part of his story Pact [2] where...

mild spoilers ahead

Someone uses time magic to disadvantage the protagonist and the chapter jumps from 6.10 to 6.12, the missing chapter representing the missing time.

1: https://www.themysterybook.com/

2: https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/subordination...

To me, this seems to be disregarding video games as a kind of ergodic literature.

In many you must act to uncover the story; the story can change according to your choices [1], or going forward requires you to decipher languages that don’t exist [2].

[1]: such as in Mass Effect, where you can loose different teammates and affect the end [2]: such as in Chants of Sennaar where you try to build a few bilingual dictionaries and finally translated from 2 unconnected languages in the end.

I got a few sentences into the article before I thought of "House of Leaves". Lo and behold, it's the first example!

The other example that comes to mind is "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks, which has large sections written in this wild phonetic Cockney-esque dialect. G.E.B also kinda fits the bill.

I'm a big fan of these types of books (even though I hadn't heard the term before), definitely tickles a different part of the brain when reading them.

I read House of Leaves last year and it was interesting. It was a good story and I enjoyed following footnotes to footnotes and tracing them back and turning the book and figuring out the hidden message.

I have S. I'm waiting to read it since there isn't a whole lot of ergodic stuff. I'm excited.

I should have bought The Unfortunates when it was available on Amazon, but it hasn't been available for some time. $50 for a used copy on Ebay seems a bit much.

Infinite Jest was basically ergodic with all the end notes flipping back and forth, plus the vocabulary.

Something Happened also requires a bit of traversal with long and sometimes nested parentheticals. I remember coming to an closing parentheses one day when I had read the opening parenthesis the previous day. I spent 10 minutes scanning backwards to find the matching parentheses to figure out the beginning of the sentence was that the parenthetical was in.

So if McLuhan spoke of "hot media", this is about "superhot media" ?

The article omits Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” — a seminal work in this vein.

A hundred thousand billion poems (anglicized title) by Raymond Queneau is my white whale in this genre. Too bad it's illegal to post on the internet.