Texton

A hypertext such as Afternoon (Joyce 1990) will have a fixed number of scriptons (and textons), while the game Adventure (Crowther and Woods 1976) will have a fixed set of textons but a variable number of scriptons (texton cominations), determined by the progress of the play. In a MUD, where other concurrent users can type in anything, the number of textons is not known.

First of all, reading the whole text is the strongest literary convention, but as was implicit in the earlier discussion, it can now mean at least four slightly different things: reading every texton and scripton, reading every texton, reading every scripton, and taking every given path through the text (i.e. exhausting the variety of paths).

Relative ergodic events are chains of events produced by the efforts of one or more individuals or mechanisms that have limited effect upon the textons or scriptons of a narrative such that the impact is only capable of affecting change in monor events within a scripton, or changing narratives at the micro scale and do not impact narratives at the macro scale.