Espen Aarseth, "Conclusions: The Ideology of Influence"

(In Cybertext)

- Persistent myth of co-creation
- Ergodic works include "the rules for its own use" and distinguishes between sucessful/unsucessful users (always?)
- Anamorphosis: hide/code aspects of a work for viewer to uncover (through non-trivial effort) -> determinate cybertexts with a "final state"
- Three kinds of literature: Novels (including explorable hypertexts), anamorphic literature, metamorphic literature (in which the user has real influence)
- Broad issues: users vs creators, old vs new terms/theory, etc.

Espen Aarseth, "Songs from the MUD: Multi-User Discourse"

(In Cybertext)

- MUDs as discourse
- Can MUDs be texts? Literature?
- No author, publisher, markets, just writers communicating in a system of symbolic capital
- Closed, non-local social places (space for play, textual pleasure)
- Not a game, because (most) rules are socially enforced (perhaps it's just a different kind of game, or a hybrid?)
- MUDs are real communities, not "virtual" ones
- Written word, text, is paramount
- MUDs as paradigmatic of mediated social interaction
- Free experimentation with fiction, personality (unlike other forms such as e-mail or IRC)
- Site for emerging social/aesthetic modes of textual communication
- Levels of discourse in MUDs: Construction/Progression/Negotiation/Quasi-event/Event
- Analogy to jazz improvisation
- Metamedium (contains other forms)
- "Netiquette" is formulated by individuals? (Isn't it socially constructed? Also describes as a "contested behavioural envelope")
- MUD players as literary cyborgs
- MUD discourse as "meaningful, intelligible mode of literary communication"

Espen Aarseth, "Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game"

(In Cybertext)

- Dungeons & Dragons as "oral cybertext" (also textual via rulebooks?)
- Adventure as folk art (Buckles)
- Elements of adventure games: Data/Processing Engines/Interface/User
- Sage advice: "study the various works that already exist and how they are played" rather than speculating/pontificating about the future aesthetic greatness of games
- Adventure has come to be understood as an ahistorical ur-text
- Alternative modes of discourse and pleasure (to traditional texts)
- Player prompts as keyholes, awaiting the right command (not "gaps" in the conventional sense)
- Aarseth seems to assume all adventure games feature some unnecessary elements or red herrings (surely some puzzle-like examples only include essential information/elements?)
- No story, only plot in adventure games (?)
- Intrigue: the player/"intriguee" must figure out the plot laid out by the intrigant
- Bizzare (and un-PC) analogy to autism?!
- Players willingly suspend capacity for normal language, abilities, etc. and accept the limited range of options offered by the game
- Intrigant (mediated by the "voice" or representation) is not the narrator or the (implied) author, rather the "whoever-it-is" in control behind the scenes, the "immanent adversary"
- Aporia/epiphany
- Adventure games take place between: Event plane/Negotiation plane/Progression plane
- "Puppet" seems to be Aarseth's proto-avatar (or at least, his proto-implied avatar)
- Aarseth overstates the difference (on a structural level) between textual and graphic adventure games - certainly some games (such as the LucasArts cycle of adventure games) are very different, but others, such as Myst, seem almost identical to text adventures beyond their audiovisual interface

Espen Aarseth, "Textonomy: A Typology of Textual Communication"

(In Cybertext)
- Attempt to establish a rigorous terminology (always suspicious)
- Downplays physical differences between media (highly dubious claim that the shift from LPs to CDs did not change the production or consumption of music - what about track-skipping and shuffle?)
- "Correspondence analysis"
- Text: "any object with the primary function to relay verbal information" that requires a material medium and is not equivalent to the information relayed (as opposed to the more agnostic/ridiculously broad definitions preferred in film studies and elsewhere)
- Scriptons: strings of signs as they appear to an ideal reader/user
- Textons: strings of signs as they exist in the text
- Elements of textonomy: Dynamics/Determinability/Transiency/Perspective/Access/Linking/User Functions
- Significant overlap between paper and electronic texts according to this typology (contra common assumptions, hypertext techno-utopianism)
- User activity is a central concern
- New media emulate features/functions of old media (curiously anticipating Bolter and Grusin's Remediation, evidently the later Bolter was paying attention to Aarseth's many scathing critiques!)

Espen Aarseth, "Paradigms and Perspectives"

(In Cybertext)

- Cybertext as a perspective, not an object
- Text as material machine (not just a syntagmatic chain of signifiers)
- Semiotics is insufficient
- How to approach a complex system with emergent behaviour (can it be a meaning-making system?)
- Look beyond the surface of sign/user and incorporate the "dual materiality" of cybernetic sign processes (code and presentation/expression/execution)
- Nonlinearity is an ambiguous, difficult concept
- Actual machines, not metaphorical ones (akin to Juul's "real rules?")
- Nonlinear vs multilinear
- Distinguish between the object/text and our experience of it (according to Aarseth, the object/text exists independently, while the experience is contingent)
- Books are not essentially linear, computers are not essentially non-linear (these are cultural-ideological conceptions)
- Interactivity is also problematic
- Cyborg aesthetics, texts as "cyborg fields" - who is in control?
- Control cannot be clearly located at any one point

Espen Aarseth, "Introduction: Ergodic Literature"

(In Cybertext)

- Cybertexts are not exclusively electronic/digital
- Non-trivial effort required
- "a machine for the production of variety of expression"
- Traditional reader simply does not have the same degree of influence
- Problematic conflation of fictional worlds and the mediated representation of that world in existing literary theory
- Struggle for (narrative) control
- Games actually are labyrinths and worlds, rather than representations
- Difference and overlap between games and narrative
- Cybertexts as synthetic, composite
- Unicursal vs multicursal labyrinths
- Metaphoric labyrinth (novel) vs actual labyrinth (game/cybertext)
- Digital database facilitates ergodic texts
- Critical of both existing literary theory approaches to digital media, and of radical techno-utopian approaches
- Whether or not cybertexts are "literature" is irrelevant, they should not be "colonized" by literary theory
- What is the actual difference, if any, between paper and computer texts? (We should not assume there is one)
- New media is only important insofar as it can tell us about human communication and culture
- "existing literary theory is incomplete (but not irrelevant)" - needs to be expanded
- "a perspective on all forms of textuality"
- Pluralist, not essentialist perspective on computer technology
- Cybernetic information feedback loop (key feature)
- Text vs reading/interpretation (understand the relationship between)
- Text exists between operator, verbal sign and medium (similar to Altman's pragmatic/semantic/syntactic model?)
- Text as machine with different parts, users
- Overlooked importance of the medium
- "redefine literature by expanding our notion of it" and literary aesthetics in turn