Cybertext as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997 is a type of ergodic literature where the user traverses the text by doing nontrivial work.

[1] The concept of cybertext offers a way to expand the reach of literary studies to include phenomena that are perceived today as foreign or marginal.

Aarseth, together with literary scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, maintains that cybertext cannot be applied according to the conventional author-text-message paradigms since it is a computational engine.

[3] The prefix is then merged with the word "text", which is identified as a distinctive structure for producing and consuming verbal meaning in post-structuralist literary theory.

[10] Cybertext came after hypermedia amid the move toward the focus on software code, particularly its considerable ability to control the reception process without reducing interactivity.

[10] The fundamental idea in the development of the theory of cybernetics is the concept of feedback: a portion of information produced by the system that is taken, total or partially, as input.

Though first used by science fiction poet Bruce Boston, the term cybertext was brought to the literary world's attention by Espen Aarseth in 1997.

[11] Aarseth's concept of cybertext focuses on the organization of the text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic.