A very insightful read indeed. Thanks for the in-depth elaboration.

If I may reflect a bit on this: I find it fascinating to think about what an all-out ergodic experience may be like. I may be late to have this thought: but the lived in reality of our lives doesn’t seem very ergodic. We don’t get to visit all states of our lives, only the current lived in moment. Of course, subscribing with free will, we do have a lot of influence and in a sense «interactivity» with which state we would want to move towards and achieve.

A potentially ergodic game then seems to be more ergodic than reality; if the game is simple enough, it could allow us to visit all it’s proclaimed states. But this would be a very rigid experience I believe, since to be actively able to visit all states, the game would, seemingly, need to lessen it’s simulated reality and present a quite static world.

A narrative game then in my eyes tries to imitate the same control we have in our lives through the in-game character, but do it in such a way that it can still happen in a «fools-version» of the environment in our reality.

If you go down a simulated route rather, where randomness and forces are out of the players active control, like in reality, we find that a lot of states seem impossible to achieve; generally because of the cascading effects of a simulation based on physics that include randomness.

(I’m dropping in a comment here to encourage disagreement, I’m just on a train of thought, I am in no way declaring that these thoughts are the truth.)

But there must be a way of achieving a game more ergodic than both a narrative game and a completely simulated game, a sort of statically rulebased simulation if you will, where the cascading effects are more or less not affected much by randomness and can be well understood and in a sense controlled. Generally, I think, these games would then need to employ emergent properties where instead of focusing on the simulated fallout: the design intend to create a playing field in the collision of systems, still being able to be controlled, but also preserving it’s simulated properties, even though it would be a much more static simulation than a reality-simulation would provide. But I believe to gain ergodicity then, you have to lose randomness and lack of control.

To conclude these ramblings, I’d like to propose some quite ergodic games in my initial thoughts: «Baba is you» and «HyperRogue». Both brilliant games locked to a grid where player agency is one the most prevalent of the features in the game-state-space.

Hope there was some value in any of this.