Let me start by warning those who haven't yet encountered this book—it's definitely not a work for the casual reader or "amateur" videogame theorist. Though it is a rather short book, it reads at times like a very, very long one. However, perhaps it is unfair to talk about readability in the context of an obviously scholar-oriented work, and I should chide myself for complaining about something so superficial. As I've often teased, "You're only bored because you don't yet understand it," and despite a careful reading, I can't honestly say I've done more than scratch the surface of the work. Cybertext is a dense book with potential value for the videogame theorist, though I caught myself wondering at times whether I should just have bought the Cliff's Notes.

Three quarters of the book is spent pointing out flaws in the work of other scholars and the inapplicability of various fields of inquiry to game studies. Some readers might find this irksome and not as useful as would have been a more thorough treatment by Aarseth of what is so right about his. Some might call Aarseth bold for declaring his own scholarship and journal the first scholarship on the subject of videogames ("game studies, year one"), though others might deem it arrogance. Aarseth is a very careful scholar (perhaps even pedantic), though despite pointing out so many errors and fallacies of other scholars, his own book contains at least one woeful mistake he seems to have copied from one of them. On page 95, for instance, he writes that Atari is responsible for Pac-Man, a mistake also made by Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck. Just for the record, though there was a version of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 (and a famously bad one it is!), Atari had nothing to do with the original arcade game, a Japanese creation by the brilliant Toru Iwatani. I've seen this misattribution in quite a few works, and it really bugs me.

Aarseth's key point is that cybertexts deserve their own body of theory, and we don't do them justice by applying theory from other disciplines willy-nilly. If you already agree with this thesis, there's little reason to read Cybertext. His #1 enemy is literary studies, and he spends page after page attacking the prospect that literary theory might have something to offer cybertext theory—though he always qualifies himself at the last minute ("it's incomplete, but not irrelevant" he writes on 17). At times he goes far beyond what is proper. Aarseth charges that those who apply literary theory to the understanding of cybertexts are "imperialists," and claims that such unscrupulous dogs fail to perform any "reassessment of the terms and concepts involved" (14). Have you ever read a work of literary theory that failed to assess the terms and concepts involved? I was under the impression that that's about all most of them do. Aarseth also blasts the work of scholars on interactive fiction. According to Aarseth, interactive fiction is "a purely ideological term, projecting an unfocused fantasy rather than a concept of any analytical substance" (51). IF scholars like Montfort themselves struggle with the term, though I find at least as useful if not more so than the term "adventure game," which Aarseth uses. I suppose IF scholars might also challenge Aarseth's contention that graphical adventure games are "more powerful representations of spatial relations than texts, and therefore [the] migration from texts to graphics is natural and inevitable" (102). I, for one, am not yet ready to concede any such thing. A GAG may offer a different representation of a spatial relation, but to call it "more powerful" seems hasty. After all, land surveyors rely on textual description, not graphics, to legally designate property—and I don’t know a "more powerful representation of a spatial relation" than a NO TRESSPASSING sign.

Still, despite its brashness and, at times, mean-spiritedness, Cybertext has some redeeming qualities. Aarseth does introduce what seems to be some genuinely useful terms to game studies. His notion of ergodicity, which he defines as the "nontrivial effort required by the reader to traverse the text," is a much better term than "gameplay," that shadowy term bandied about in game reviews. Aarseth borrows "ergodicity" from physics, though the word is ultimately derived from two Greek terms, ergon (work) and path (path). It's a neat term, because the objective of so many games is to do a certain kind of work successfully to move further along a path. Part of learning any new game is learning how to properly navigate and thus explore it. Aarseth introduces a whole set of terms for dealing with texts—"scritpons" (text as it appears to readers) and "textons" (the actual text) being two of the more intriguing ones. This rather Platonic distinction makes real sense in discussions of videogames, where in one sense a game is simply so many lines of code, whereas what most of us mean by the term is what appears on the screen (and what comes through the speakers, etc.)

Aarseth builds an apparatus to help us "describe any text according to their mode of traversal" (62). The variables are dynamics, determinability, transiency, perspective, access, linking, and user functions. After defining these terms, Aarseth maps out a set of texts, hypertexts, and cybertexts onto a grid. What emerges is a fascinating map. Aarseth claims there are 576 unique positions in which to place any particular work, though I suspect the system is a bit more ambiguous than it may appear at first. Still, it's an admirable attempt, and a lot more rational and complete than many I've seen. This analysis should have comprised far more than a single chapter.

I also liked his discussion of the two types of labyrinths, unicursal (only one path through) and multicursal (forked paths). He also has some very interesting things to say about the difference between narratives and games. According to Aarseth, narratives have two levels (description and narration) whereas games can have description and/or ergodics. He specifically denies that Pac-Man has a narrative (apparently, he thinks little of the "cut scenes," which he apparently does not consider to be part of the game).

Aarseth's own position on narrative in games is hard to pin down. At one point, he writes that "instead of a narrated plot, cybertext produces a sequence of oscillating activities effectuated (but certainly not controlled) by the user" (112). Aarseth uses variations of the term "intrigue" to describe the roles played by the gamer, game-maker, and the game itself in this sequence. According to Aarseth, a reader of a narrative is "powerless," since the outcome of a story will be the same regardless of the reader's actions. A spectator at a soccer game can yell and carry on, but he'll never be a player. The player of an adventure game, though, must rely on her skill and cleverness if she wants to move the plot forward. I addressed this point in an article I wrote about Dragon's Lair, where my contention was that even though the gamer often dies while playing, it's well understood by everyone that this isn't the way the game is supposed to end. Thus, while we like to talk about adventure games as "players making their own story," or "where YOU are the author," and so on, really the player is on a linear path towards a definite ending, though she may trip and fall down occasionally. Games with no endings, such as Space Invaders, actually do have an ending—death. You're supposed to die. More interesting are games with alternate endings depending on how you play through them. In these cases, I'd say the game was "multicursal," still linear in the sense that there are lines, but more complicated because there are more than one correct solution (many lines). A clear example of this is Mortal Kombat, which shows different endings and story snippets depending on which avatar beats the game.

Naturally, since Mat and I are developing a book about GAGs, I paid special attention whenever Aarseth was talking about adventure games. He's often humorous in his adventure game section and has a lot of fun revealing the absurdities of the parser in Deadline. One of the better quotes I found was his assertion that "despite the lavish and quite expensive graphics of [modern GAGs], the player's creative options are still as primitive as they were in 1976" (103). Aarseth seems to be basing this opinion mostly on the lack of good artificial intelligence in NPCs. "Personal relations and habits in an adventure game like Deadline might best be described as autistic," he writes. I can certainly agree with him here. I was amazed that even in MYST URU, one of the highest-profile adventure games of the past few years, the single NPC was so utterly disappointing in his ability to interact with the player. You could click him repeatedly and have him stop in mid-sentence and restart at the beginning. He was more like one of those dolls with the string you pull to hear a message than an NPC. Of course, there are plenty of GAGs and IF out there whose NPCs are more believable. For what it's worth, the crow character in The Longest Journey is hardly "autistic," and at times seems more intelligent and capable than the player!

Thanks to Cybertext, any scholar who dares to write about videogames will have to expend some rhetoric explaining why theory elements culled from other fields are relevant for game studies. I read quite a bit of this rhetoric in Screen Play, a book where film scholars offer perspectives on videogames. Unfortunately, I haven't seen other scholars using the clever framework he built to analyze the ergodicity of texts.

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