"The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world, or world-game; it is possible to explore to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery." -Espen Aarseth
Recently I came across a reference to S. being an ergodic work.
Ergodic was coined by a Norwegian, Espen Aarseth, in his
book Cybertext. Ergodic means literature in which the reader must put
in "nontrivial effort to traverse". As best as I can understand,
Aarseth, said it’s not the medium that defines something as cybertext but
whether the text is ergodic. He names the I Ching as an example of
cybertext because it includes instructions for its own use.
Cybernetics was the term coined by the scientist Norbert Weiner to describe regulatory systems. Origin of the word "cybernetics" is derived from Greek words: kybernetike, kybernetes, kybernao and kybernesis. The word that I find most interesting is "kybernetike" which many sources equate with helmsman. Aristotle used the term "kybernetike tehkne" to describe the art of the navigator.
The helmsman is always the navigator of the ship. Maelstrom appears to be the helmsman, he is the one that has access to the maps and navigational tools on the xebec. And while sometimes the helmsman can also be the captain, Maelstrom is very clear when he tells S. the ship has no captain.
Espen Aarseth is from Bergen, a name which appears in a footnote, and has since shifted his focus to computer games, in fact, he wrote an essay called Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock for an anthology. He defines aporia as the state of puzzlement when the person interacting with the game has hit a dead-end and epiphany as the insight or luck that allows the person to move forward.
Incidentally, I also found out that compasses were manufactured in Bergen, the fictional book The Spinning Compass appears in the same footnote as the name Bergen.
What if the xebec is some sort of strange "ergodic event space?" We do know that S. has observed that time moves differently on the boat and this is something Aarseth speaks to in his essay, and yet S. is still in synch with real world time as he continues to age as years pass.
"...ergodic time, e.g., in the case of Doom, depends upon the user and his actions to realize itself." -Aarseth
S.'s changing text on the xebec bears a resemblance to John Cayley's work The Speaking Clock, in which algorithms make changes to poetical text using algorithms and time.
“In more than one sense, the clock is speaking of time: the time of the machine (which may be incorrect), the time of the observer (who has little time to make sense of the oracular clock), and of the reading of time, which is not time itself. Here, ergodics speaks of the “profound enigma (to quote Ricoeur, 272) in a way denied narrative, but also with an aporetics of its own.”Aarseth also makes the observation that with Cayley's work, epiphanies are difficult, if not impossible to obtain. And S. has few, if any, real epiphanies while on the boat.
“…we must reconceive the notion [of ergodic works] as a type of object that can reveal different aspects at different times and places, less like a book and more like a complex building with many entrances/exits and labyrinthine, sometimes changing, innards; but one which is still recognized as occupying the same “site” in cultural history." -Aarseth
