My mother and I have been playing Zelda (Twilight Princess) on the Wii for the last two months. We both like the game, but for different reasons:
I love becoming a wolf; she hates it.
I love killing spiders; she loves freeing monkeys.
I love the epic science-fiction action; she longs for the days of animal herding and being an example to the young children in link's village.
By definition, ergodic means: "of or pertaining to the condition that, in an interval of sufficient duration, a system will return to states that are closely similar to previous ones: the assumption of such a condition underlies statistical methods used in modern dynamics and atomic theory." (source: www.dictionary.com)
According to Aarseth:
"In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.
"A reader, however strongly engaged in the unfolding of a narrative, is powerless.
"The cybertext reader, on the other hand... is not a reader. The cybertext puts its would-be reader at risk: the risk of rejection. The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure."
By definition, Zelda is ergodic. The point of the game is to restore the universe (game-world) to its original state. This game is much like the Cybertexts Aarseth describes. Without completing objective A, the player cannot complete objective B. In rare cases, the player is able to complete a series of objectives in whichever order he pleases, but he must still complete a pre-designated series of objectives before he is able to move on to the next level.
In this situation, the player is part of a pre-determined narrative. He does, however, feel as if he has choices, for he does, but they are limited and do not create alternate outcomes. His options are contained within in a limited system.