Well done, friend! Like i said outside of the comments, you made me care about topics that rarely interest me, and then used them to build a full of library of solid thought and branching offshoots of thinking. Appreciated the House of Leaves footnote as well las all the references little known to me!
Hi Kamela! Thank you so much for your kindness and support! It really means a lot to me. If you're interested, I'd be happy to share my favorite article I've written on the connection between video games and religion: https://christandpopculture.com/the-lurid-profanity-of-blasphemous/
This is a great essay, I love most of it, but I am driven to nitpick because I care a lot about ergodic literature and Aarseth's "Cybertext" was a really illuminating work for me:
"Media theorist Espin Arseth has a $400 word for art like this. He calls it “ergodic”: art that requires real effort to consume.
You could say that video games have always been the original form of ergodic art."
The effort is the second-order effect of what makes a work ergodic, not what defines it as ergodic in the first place. A narrative is ergodic if it's PATH DEPENDENT. It comes from statistics: 2% average growth per year can put you in the poorhouse or make you a billionaire, depending on the path that average works out: 14% year one, -10% year two is 2% average per year but results in less money in the bank than 3% year one, 1% year two for any x.
So the idea that a story is ergodic is that it changes, within certain parameters, based off the paths a participant takes. In some cases those forking paths lead to the same end, just with a different journey (Star Fox 64 is a good example, where you can zig-zag through the map but always end up facing the same villain at the end) or end up with a completely different ending (Myst is a great example).
Anyway yes, videogames and interactive narratives are more or less ergodic. Aarseth has a great description where he discusses how a designer of such narratives has to be mindful of how much or how little control a player has and how the story guides them, because give them too much and they'll start poking at all the map edges and seeking out the glitches, but give them too little and they'll get frustrated or bored.
But Aarseth goes into a lot of detail describing various origins of ergodic art that precede videogames, including the I Ching and some forms of pictographic writing.
Anyway sorry to get all WeLl AkShUaLlY in the comments of your post, but it's an area I'm really enthusiastic about and wanted to footnote in detail.
I loooooooooove this. Thank you for putting it on my radar! I'm especially curious about the connection to I Ching and wonder what other lines might be drawn between ergodic art, divination, and maybe the 21st Century revival of esotericism (the "tech-gnosis" stuff, chaos magick, Deleuzian sorcery, etc.)
Also, this: "Give them too much and they'll start poking at all the map edges and seeking out the glitches."
This is exactly what happens in every FromSoft game ever once the community gets a chance to dick around, so this made me laugh appreciatively.
I just hit the part of Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon that mentions a group of travelers in DeepArcher, a fictional Metaverse of sorts invented for the book full of dynamically appearing and disappearing links, as they purposefully seek the Abyss, or edge of information itself, and his comparisons of that search with witchcraft and divination.
I have zero experience playing Elden Ring or even similar games - and, you managed to explain this world in a way that I think I understand why you can't bring yourself to finish the game. I think this should be in a larger publication! Good stuff!
Thank you so much for reading, Minna! I actually had similar feelings playing through the multiple threads of "Mass Effect," which is an epic sci-fi and reminds me more of your work!
Is it bad that I think you would have done well to *also* withhold this to submit to a magazine? There are just NOT ENOUGH thoughtful works on Elden Ring. Well done!
Well done, friend! Like i said outside of the comments, you made me care about topics that rarely interest me, and then used them to build a full of library of solid thought and branching offshoots of thinking. Appreciated the House of Leaves footnote as well las all the references little known to me!
This is some of the best writing about video games I've seen.
Hi Kamela! Thank you so much for your kindness and support! It really means a lot to me. If you're interested, I'd be happy to share my favorite article I've written on the connection between video games and religion: https://christandpopculture.com/the-lurid-profanity-of-blasphemous/
Glad to connect with you!
This is a great essay, I love most of it, but I am driven to nitpick because I care a lot about ergodic literature and Aarseth's "Cybertext" was a really illuminating work for me:
"Media theorist Espin Arseth has a $400 word for art like this. He calls it “ergodic”: art that requires real effort to consume.
You could say that video games have always been the original form of ergodic art."
The effort is the second-order effect of what makes a work ergodic, not what defines it as ergodic in the first place. A narrative is ergodic if it's PATH DEPENDENT. It comes from statistics: 2% average growth per year can put you in the poorhouse or make you a billionaire, depending on the path that average works out: 14% year one, -10% year two is 2% average per year but results in less money in the bank than 3% year one, 1% year two for any x.
So the idea that a story is ergodic is that it changes, within certain parameters, based off the paths a participant takes. In some cases those forking paths lead to the same end, just with a different journey (Star Fox 64 is a good example, where you can zig-zag through the map but always end up facing the same villain at the end) or end up with a completely different ending (Myst is a great example).
Anyway yes, videogames and interactive narratives are more or less ergodic. Aarseth has a great description where he discusses how a designer of such narratives has to be mindful of how much or how little control a player has and how the story guides them, because give them too much and they'll start poking at all the map edges and seeking out the glitches, but give them too little and they'll get frustrated or bored.
But Aarseth goes into a lot of detail describing various origins of ergodic art that precede videogames, including the I Ching and some forms of pictographic writing.
Anyway sorry to get all WeLl AkShUaLlY in the comments of your post, but it's an area I'm really enthusiastic about and wanted to footnote in detail.
I loooooooooove this. Thank you for putting it on my radar! I'm especially curious about the connection to I Ching and wonder what other lines might be drawn between ergodic art, divination, and maybe the 21st Century revival of esotericism (the "tech-gnosis" stuff, chaos magick, Deleuzian sorcery, etc.)
Also, this: "Give them too much and they'll start poking at all the map edges and seeking out the glitches."
This is exactly what happens in every FromSoft game ever once the community gets a chance to dick around, so this made me laugh appreciatively.
I just hit the part of Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon that mentions a group of travelers in DeepArcher, a fictional Metaverse of sorts invented for the book full of dynamically appearing and disappearing links, as they purposefully seek the Abyss, or edge of information itself, and his comparisons of that search with witchcraft and divination.
I have zero experience playing Elden Ring or even similar games - and, you managed to explain this world in a way that I think I understand why you can't bring yourself to finish the game. I think this should be in a larger publication! Good stuff!
Thank you so much for reading, Minna! I actually had similar feelings playing through the multiple threads of "Mass Effect," which is an epic sci-fi and reminds me more of your work!
Is it bad that I think you would have done well to *also* withhold this to submit to a magazine? There are just NOT ENOUGH thoughtful works on Elden Ring. Well done!