Ergodic Narratives

Having previously mused about the role that riddles play in interactive fiction, as outlined by Nick Montfort in Twisty Little Passages, today I’d like to consider the strange idea of ergodic narratives. Montfort provides a brief history of these ‘literary machines’ in third chapter of his book, although he also makes reference to the phrase ‘ergodic literature’ to describe them. (The reference comes from the title of a book by Espen Arseth titled Cybertext: Perspective on Ergodic Literature; which I haven’t read.)

 

Most folks have never used the word ‘ergodic’. I have, but that’s likely because I’m trained as a physical chemist and I teach a class in statistical thermodynamics. From that point of view, an ergodic system is one that explores all possible configurations proportional to their volume, and thereby provide seemingly stable macroscopic properties such as the pressure and temperature of an ideal gas. Assuming this system is thermodynamically closed, pressure comes from molecules colliding against the walls of the container, and temperature is related to the average kinetic energy of those molecules. The possible configurations limited in a closed box containing the gas, can all be explored. Hence, it is an ergodic system.

 

Most chemical reactions that you run in lab behave ergodically. That’s why we can apply the laws of thermodynamics, calculate interesting properties of the system, and then use our knowledge to predict and design new chemical systems. When you have zillions of particles colliding with each other in a limited spatial environment, the system space is quickly and efficiently explored. As long as the chemical reaction is not too slow, the system reaches equilibrium – where it has zero free energy and can now be described in statistical terms. As to the singular fate of a singular molecule, that’s hard to keep track of.

 

But stories, narratives, and literature, are not typically ergodic. When I read a typical story, I can only explore one path – that set out by the writer. While I am reading, or usually after I finish the book, I might consider alternative endings or how things might have worked out if one of the characters of the story had made different choices. Engaging stories require their protagonists to make difficult choices without knowing the consequences – those choices reveal the character of the characters!

 

Choose Your Own Adventure books allow you to examine more than one path. You as the reader make choices for the protagonist, which may lead to different fates. Sometimes dice are rolled to simulate a chance outcome, based on statistics. You can ‘replay’ the adventures choosing different paths until you explore all possible fates. This is ergodic in a very constrained sense. The authors have still determined the limited number of all possible fates. Computers have allowed us to multiply the number of possibilities, but our linear consciousness only allows us to experience this serially and sequentially. Even as you jump in and out via hypertext links, your conscious self can only follow the narrative along some path even if it is non-linear.

 

Why would anyone therefore bother with trying to come up with an ergodic narrative? Montfort’s brief historical overview mentions some interesting cases. The I Ching (also known as “the Book of Changes”), an ancient Chinese ‘literary machine’, utilizes a set of protocols to generate a particular oracular text. In Europe, Ramon Llull, a thirteenth-century religious philosopher and mystic devised a set of procedures to generate different textual combinations. More recently, in 1961, a Frenchman ‘wrote’ a “book with ten sonnets (each of the usual fourteen lines) bound one in front of the other and with each line cut so that it could be turned like a page, separately. Any one of the ten lines could be selected for each position… Hence there are 10¹⁴ possible poems in the book which would take more than 190 million years to read.” That same year saw another French publication: “150 loose, unnumbered pages in a box – invites the reader to shuffle the pages and read them in any order.” Apparently, it is a biography of a fictional French soldier and, depending on how you read it, colors your idea of his character.

 

The limitation of such attempts at multiple paths is that you are constrained by the creativity of the writers and the fixed texts (albeit with movable parts). Possibly more satisfying is to have a live author, and that is perhaps the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons and other such role-playing games. While I’ve never played it, reading Montfort’s book and other works on the history of games, indicates that a talented ‘dungeon master’ can provide a fantastic immersive narrative experience for the ‘players’. Is this ergodic? I don’t know. Certain paths are chosen. And players might not want to explore all possible paths, just the ones they’re interested in. We’re not like slime mold – which oozes to explore all its possibilities of finding food, before optimizing the most efficient route. Seemingly machine-like slime mold is.

 

Perhaps our humanness is what makes ergodic narratives interesting. They tickle those ‘what if?’ questions that regularly pop up in our conscious minds. Maybe our subconscious can process in parallel; I don’t consciously know because I can’t consciously analyze my subconscious. Our real life, lived out, certainly feels non-ergodic, limited by only adjacent possibilities. (Yes, there could be multiverses budding out constantly with every ‘choice’ but we have no access to them.) And maybe the exploration of multiple paths provides us with some feeling of control and being able to optimize. I might enjoy single narrative books, but I also enjoy boardgames that can be played repeatedly with different outcomes – replaying the tape of life, as it were. That’s the closest I get to interacting with an ergodic narrative.