Vortext and Coretext

There is a scene in Peter Weir’s film Fearless where Jeff Bridges—playing Max Klein, a man who has just survived a plane accident—finds his son Jonah playing a videogame. During the game, Jonah yells out something like, “I’ve just died,” which sends Max into a fury about what death really is. In the middle of this rage, everyone but Max realizes that Jonah did nothing wrong, that language uses the same word for different purposes all the time, that there is a difference between death in real life and in a videogame but that both are still “deaths.”

I’m thinking about this scene today because I spent probably a little too much of tonight playing “Arteroids,” an art game by Jim Andrews that is a cross between digital poetry and a videogame. It actually is a videogame, one based on the classic Atari videogame Asteroids. This means it is a fairly simple shooting game. We, the players, sit in space and shoot at “arteroids” (individual words or phrases) that come across the screen at us. We can move our icon—the word “desire” in play mode and the word “poetry” in game mode—in modest ways, and we shoot at the arteroids and destroy them.

Jim Andrews, et al., “Arteroids,” Play Mode, Level 1 (1 Jan 2006)
(Click on image for a readable view)
I began the game in play mode, because this gave me greater flexibility. I could make myself invincible if I wanted to, but most important to me was that I could change the words that made up the arteroids in the game. Andrews allows the reader to take part in creating this poem; he allows the reader to be what he calls a “wreader.”* In this mode, the icon for the player is the word “desire,” which serves as the touchstone to check whether the rest of the words flying at us fit in this poem.

As I played the game, I read the words as they converged on me (the word “desire”). These words almost formed a poem in my mind, but their sequence was dependent on my attention—on which arteroid was closer to me and more apt to kill me. And there is some tension in reading words that are attacking you, so the experience of reading changes dramatically. Another feature of play mode is that I could change the speed of the poem, the velocity at which the arteroids moved. At the top speed, the word came at me so quickly I exploded into nothingness in an eye’s blink.


Geof Huth’s First Score at “Arteroids” (1 Jan 2006)
But at the end of each round, the game gave me a score, just as if I were playing a real videogame. I believe the reason for this was that I was playing a videogame, but it was still a bit of a surprise.


Jim Andrews, et al., “Arteroids,” Game Mode, Level 4 (1 Jan 2006)
(Click on image for a readable view)
The standard mode for “Arteroids” is game mode, where you have to move through its 216 levels one by one—and only after you have mastered each level by maximizing the meanometor (which doesn’t make this sound like a poem). But playing “Arteroids” is a rich esthetic experience (not—mind you—that playing a videogame isn’t†). Every time the player hits a key the game makes a sound, and each is a rich sound because Andrews writes for the ear. The player can be changed by the wreader, but each is rich and full of echo. Each hit of an arteroid produces a slightly humorous beep or gurgle, and with the death of the player the game makes a dramatic crashing sound.

Visually, the game works quite well, if simply. Once an arteroid is hit, it explodes and forms a circle of characters, though not usually the letters of the word itself. These transformations suggest that each word carries within its belly other beings just waiting to be released. These newborn beings are also dramatically larger than their parents, though they fade away soon after. And, once you lose a round, the game consoles you with fortune-cookie-like words, such as “I wish that you would win delight.”

As with all of Andrews’ recent work, “Arteroids” asks us to question the limits of poetry and forces us to break down barriers between artforms. Andrews is interested in testing words in new environments and seeing what they can do. He also wants the reader to have some control over the final product. This is a new kind of art, one we are still getting used to. “Arteroids” is never the same twice. Its words are never quite the same; its explosions can never occur in the same sequence. It is conceptual art, and I like that. But what I enjoyed most was that I could change the words, that I could improve the poem from my end, making it more like the poem I wanted it to be.

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*Though this concept is not uniquely Jim Andrews’. The concept of a reader who has to create a particular piece of writing is common in contemporary criticism. And my first chapbook was a book of pwoermds entitled wreadings for that very reason. But Jim means something even more essential in his case: he means that the reader is actually writing the poem, either by changing the words or by modifying how the words appear on the screen.

†For instance, the multi-user game, “World of Warcraft,” is an amazing movielike experience. Built upon a sword and sorcery esthetic, the world of WoW is remarkably detailed and real, with many different lands and climates, and with incredible depth: a player can follow the game down any number of passageways down a mine or up a couple of flight of stairs into a building. Players can choose their names and features to create a unique persona to play the game. And a huge number of players and drone characters populate the landscape. The entire experience is like a beautiful film that won’t end. Twenty-four hours a day, many people are playing WoW all across the world, and they have to use the Internet to do it. They have to play together. At first, it is a weirdly disconcerting experience to realize that a character running across the screen is being controlled by a real person—and that that real person might be sitting three thousand miles from where you are sitting at that particular moment.

ecr. l’inf.