Ergodic Literature

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 &#x2F;100.html URI before the update went up as well as the perfectly executed smooth aspect ratio change mid-animation.)<p><pre><code> 1. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mspaintadventures.com 2. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sbnation.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;17776-football 3. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.homestarrunner.com</code></pre>

I&#x27;m currently reading theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh [1] which also fits this category. It&#x27;s full of transcripts of calls, frames of film, email threads, redacted pages, news articles. Highly recommend it, it&#x27;s so nice to be surprised by what you find every other page-turn.<p>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...<p><i>mild spoilers ahead</i><p>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.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themysterybook.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themysterybook.com&#x2F;</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pactwebserial.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;subordination-6-10&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pactwebserial.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;subordination...</a>

To me, this seems to be disregarding video games as a kind of ergodic literature.<p>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].<p>[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 &quot;House of Leaves&quot;. Lo and behold, it&#x27;s the first example!<p>The other example that comes to mind is &quot;Feersum Endjinn&quot; by Iain M. Banks, which has large sections written in this wild phonetic Cockney-esque dialect. G.E.B also kinda fits the bill.<p>I&#x27;m a big fan of these types of books (even though I hadn&#x27;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.<p>I have S. I&#x27;m waiting to read it since there isn&#x27;t a whole lot of ergodic stuff. I&#x27;m excited.<p>I should have bought The Unfortunates when it was available on Amazon, but it hasn&#x27;t been available for some time. $50 for a used copy on Ebay seems a bit much.<p>Infinite Jest was basically ergodic with all the end notes flipping back and forth, plus the vocabulary.<p>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 &quot;hot media&quot;, this is about &quot;superhot media&quot; ?

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&#x27;s illegal to post on the internet.