Arteroids by Jim Andrews

"The battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness."
http://vispo.com/arteroids/arteroids.htm


Jim Andrews "Arteroids" is packaged as a video game in which the player shoots a series of falling, swirling words, letters and place fillers.The player is put in a position of trying to piece together a narrative out of the words as the fall, while struggling to translate a series of sounds, from guttural grunts to high pitched whines, which seem to almost mean something but never quite amount to anything. At times, the game is frustrating. Control of this alternate reality is tenuous at best. The player drives his/her weaponry around the board using arrows on the keyboard, but the arrows do not respond as one might expect; up does not mean up, down does not mean down. But in some ways, that frustration drives the game even further. You can hardly help wanting to find the endgame, the point to all this madness.

Andrews himself said, in an essay on the matter, "arteroids is about cracking language open." Literally and figuratively, it breaks the essential elements of communication down to their most basic substance and demonstrates both the inherent meaninglessness of symbols without context and the natural desire of the human mind derive meaning from all forms of communication. Are the symbols really meaningless or if one looks hard enough can it just be pieced together?

Ultimately, the disjointed poetry always loses its battle against the forces of dullness. But for me the game raises an interesting issue about art and all forms of communication in the computer age. As we become increasingly dependent on the Internet to supply our means of connection, we seem to become less connected to the tangible world. Is it possible that we could go to far? That eventually traditional forms of art, of communication, will become not only obsolete, but meaningless?