Video Games and Interactive Art as a New Aesthetic Category

Video games raise philosophical questions that static or purely linear temporal art forms do not, because they are interactive: the player's choices causally shape which events occur, in what order, and sometimes with what outcome, distributing a portion of authorship between designer and player in a way literature and film do not. Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) supplies foundational vocabulary for this shift, coining the term "ergodic" — from the Greek ergon, "work," and hodos, "path" — to designate texts, including video games, hypertext fiction, and even the ancient Chinese I Ching, that require what Aarseth calls "nontrivial effort" from the user to traverse from beginning to end, in contrast with the trivial, linear reading effort a novel or a film demands of its audience.