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Ergodic Literature

21 points aragonite 1 day ago 5 comments

Trace88 1 hour ago | parent

These rely so heavily on physical layout that e-readers basically ruin the whole experience.

jhbadger 27 minutes ago | parent

Some of them maybe. But remember, "Choose Your Own Adventure" counts as ergodic, and those are actually improved by e-readers as it is more immersive to press on a link to make a decision than to turn to a specific page. Also, although I've not seen an electronic copy, I'd imagine "Dictionary of the Khazars", which is basically a fictional encyclopedia, could be improved by links the way Wikipedia is more pleasant to use than printed encyclopedias.

dmbche 1 hour ago | parent

Good reminder to check back on House of Leaves. Didn't like it but it keeps nagging at my brain, I must have missed something.

It's quite exhausting to read though.

Although thinking about it now I remember feeling the author being kind of cruel in making things hard to read/understand with that as the purpose (the real excentric stuff at the end), it put me off. Maybe I just don't like it.

Waterluvian 44 minutes ago | parent

This is essentially what Myst is, isn’t it? It has a clear start and end. But the books are visited in any order. And as a bonus; the pages of the red and blue books are reassembled in any order.

smitty1e 34 minutes ago | parent

I did a story once where the the action gradually departed the main text and shifted into footnotes on the page.

The whole story was silly, and that particular page was "stunt writing", so I'm not quite sure that it qualifies.

There is also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manuscript_Found_in_Sarago... which was made into an interesting movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059643/

That's more about recursion than anything.