SamR Rambles About Hypertext

Quickly spewed out by Sam Rebelsky.

Professor R. walked into class, looking somewhat dishelved. He carried a large pile of notes that he dumped on the table, and then promptly ignored. He turned to my friend, J.A., and asked ``So, what were we going to talk about today?'' J.A. responded ``You said something about ergodic literature'' but I couldn't find anything about it on the Web. Professor R. brightened. ``Ah! Ergodic literature. A fascinating subject, and closely related to our core topic of hypertext. Hmmm ... what can we say about the word Ergodic. Did anyone find out anything?'' After some back-and-forth with the class in which he chided us for not having looked hard enough to learn more about the term and concept, he eventually helped us discover that ergodic literature is literature that gives the reader some control over the narrative. While that definition clearly fits hypertext, Professor R. also claimed that we can think of video games, ``randomized texts'' and host of other things as ergodic, even though we don't think of them as hypertext.

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