"Perhaps more interesting than speculating on the reason these projects generally…fail to reach human standards is speculating on what would result if computer poetics abandoned the 'android mode' and tried to create genres unconstrained by the aesthetic ideals of narrative literaure and Aristotelian drama."
-- Espen Aarseth, Cybertext, 129.

Aarseth's basic suggestion in 1997 is nothing earth-shattering - hypertext aesthetics (or, in Aarseth's case, all ergodic authors) work a lot better when they aren't restricted to the conventions of print text. This is an idea that I come back to again and again: in order for hypertext to progress as a field, especially a field outside of print literature, critics and readers need to shift the way they think out of a print mode and into an electronic one. Aarseth's vision in this passage is a little different, though. He's calling for something experimental and unforeseen. Most people have some preconceived idea of the elements of good literature or drama, be it a narrative, closure, or catharsis. When computer poetics ape the emotions of human drama, we notice the fraud.

However, when we enter "android mode," we try to read literature through a conventional rather than an adaptive lens. When we abandon the conventional model of reading/criticism for an adaptive one, we will be able to criticize not just the "human" side of it - a two thousand year old definition of narrative - but the side of it that is solely digital. Cybertext is a prototype for the study of computer poetics because it analyzes not only human-authored texts but computer generated texts, like AI (Artifical Intelligence) engines and text game interfaces. Though computer poetics is (for now) not my territory, Aarseth's android metaphor theorizes hypertext as a dialogue between technology and literature, an interplay that can not be thought of as if it were only an electronicized version of print text.