As happenstance would have it, I received in the USPS yesterday a book by Espen J. Aarseth called Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Aarseth has a wonderful quotation from Italo Calvino:
"Literature is a combinatorial game that persues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on the seocnd level is of great concern to the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconsciousness, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and his society."
Calvino was involved with the French experimental writing group, Oulipo (ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop of potential literature) which included Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, and Harry Mathews. They played around wtih language and texts mixing math and literature. One of their most famous bits was the S + 7 gimmick: take a text and replace each noun in it with the 7th noun after the original noun's entry in some agreed-upon dictionary. Fun stuff. Aarseth's book is mainly about text-based adventure games.
