Espen J. Aarseth (born 1965) is a Norwegian academic specializing in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature.

He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics[2] at the University of Bergen, and worked there until 2003, at which time he was a full professor.

Aarseth's works include groundbreaking Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins UP 1997) book, which was originally his doctoral thesis.

Cybertext focuses on mechanical organization of texts by placing the medium as a critical part of literary exchanges.

The book also contains a well-known (pre-ludological) theory, "typology of cybertext" which allows ergodic texts to be classified by their functional qualities.