I've been following the GrandTextAuto comment thread , mostly as excerpted and commented on by Jason, who singles out this by Nick:
The difference between the virtual environment of a novel (or a poem like the Inferno) and that of a computer game is the difference between description and simulation. They're not the same; the latter requires not just interpretation but operation as well. Theories of textual interpretation don't explain how people operate cybertexts. (my emphasis)
I agree with Jason that textual criticism (what he more loosely calls "textual studies") has something to contribute to the discussion. The interpretational reader has historically also been an operational editor. Melville's Moby Dick or Shakespeare's The Tempest may be non-ergodic from a synchronic perspective, but are intensely ergodic from a diachronic one, as anyone who has ever picked up a critical edition with a table of variants can testify. I'll bet Thomas Bowdler, purging and rewriting the Bard in the nineteenth century, had the writer's cramp to prove he was an operator and not just an interpreter.
We've had ergodic editions for thousands of years . . .
I wonder, too, how long before these kinds of distinctions are finally obsolete, quaint even. In some respects the interpretation/operation distinction is already living on borrowed time. What happens when the individual graphemes of Moby Dick, Aarseth's quintessential example of a non-ergodic text, become graspable media, subject to general reassembly? By scooping up a handful of letters, I can toss Ishmael over the side of the Pequod to join the rest of the crew. Farfetched? Not if The Tangible Media Group at MIT has its way. Given the pace of technological change, maybe we need to build next-generation theories of interactivity, virtual worlds, etc. now. My own guess is that we'll start to see a tangible or operational or kinetic component to standardized, institutional literacy programs in the very near future. For readers of tomorrow, living in an age of ubiquitous computing, understanding the historical decoupling of operation and interpretation will require an exertion of the imagination.
Maybe the Cybertext theorist has the responsibility of writing simultaneously to a future as well as a contemporary audience?
Posted by karik at June 20, 2003 2:06 PM | TrackBackHow could I resist asking?
Is the "future" to "operational" as the ~past~ is to ~interpretational~?
From another tangent, is it possible that the contemplative/active distinction in the operation/interpretation pair is an effect of collapsing, as cognitive categories, sensation with perception. ... how would the discourse develop if we were to begin with the question of the control the playback process: reading and being read to and the possible interventions into the pacing of being read to and reading