[Premise] In creator Jim Andrews’ own words, “Arteroids is quite an aggressive piece in relation to art and poetry. You shoot things. They explode. There’s a ‘game mode’ in which you play to win whereas-let us be clear-poetry is not a game somebody wins.” Employing the canonized mechanics of Asteroids, players pilot their id-entity in an effort to destroy assailing texts. The real treat of this literary machine is the creation of meaning through the destruction of text.

[Read] Playing Arteroids immediately brought to mind the Database/Narrative Opposition as described by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media:

…the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world. pg. 225

Now I realize that I am walking a fine line when I talk about narratives anywhere near games (because thanks to the Internet, some threads never die). Regardless, Manovich goes on to explain that narratives, much like games, harbor an inner algorithm implanted by its designers or authors. It is the role of players and readers alike to recreate this algorithm through the discovery of the underlying logic that assigns meaning to action within the greater construct.

The overwhelming majority of videogames and narratives produced thus far share a bias towards predetermined structure and intent. Conversely, play and the database are rather open and flowing concepts that are really only limited by our perceptions of said concepts.

Arteroids skews this opposition in an interesting way. Andrews created a database with intent. Somewhere there is a logic that explains why he specific words and phrases while excluding others. In play we may speculate on the nature of his algorithm, but the game isn’t really capable of revealing it. Furthermore this skewing of traditional oppositions allows simply narratives to form without such an implicit narrative (we see a trickle down effect from the logic that formed the database).

As words and phrases float towards our literary avatar, we develop associations based on the various juxtapositions we observe and derive meaning based on those observations. Then we destroy words, shattering association, and creating space for new ones to be formed. The syntagm formed from this series of “words -> association -> meaning” units becomes a narrative born of the player’s interpretation of Andrews’ database.

Within the free-play mode of Arteroids the player is allowed to enter words and phrases into the database, but this is also done with intent and will still inevitably lead to unexpected syntagm narratives as the player’s database algorithm interacts with Andrews’.

I would love to see a version of Arteroids powered by something like Jeff Crouse’s Switchboard (a Processing library for empowering “real-time art”). Relatively simple technically, but potentially brilliant in motion.

words -> association -> meaning

Consider the possibilities.

Jim Andrews’ Arteroids: Play the game and read his essays.

Jeff Crouse’s Real-Time Art & Switchboard: A great thesis & software library.