Arteroids

By Jim Andrews

Arteroids is Jim Andrews's shoot-em-up poetry videogame. It is widely regarded as one of the most lively, engaging works of digital poetry.

This book contains most of the hundreds of texts that the game can display after the player completes a level or is killed by marauding texts. These texts address the player and explore the relations between poetry, games, and play. The book also contains some of the texts that can appear during game-play, and new and old writings by Andrews about Arteroids.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365956256

Book preview

Arteroids

Arteroids

Also by Jim Andrews

vispo.com

globebop.com

How to Pleasurably Stop Smoking

Title Page

The Battle of Poetry Against Itself

and the Forces of Dullness

Jim Andrews

vispo.com

Vancouver

2017

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 by Jim Andrews

Vispo.com publishing

vispo.com

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Andrews, Jim 1959—

Arteroids / Jim Andrews

ISBN: 978-1-365-95625-6

First edition

Dedication

For Natalie Funk, Regina Célia Pinto,

and Leo Flores.

Acknowledgments

My mom, Evelyn Andrews, endured the creation of Arteroids and helped me financially all through that time. I love her and miss her. And feel very grateful for her support.

Body

Arteroids the Shoot-Em-Up Poetry Game

Parts of this are cannibalized from my 2002 essay Games, Po, Art, Play, and Arteroids 2.03.

Arteroids (vispo.com/arteroids) is a shoot-em-up poetry game I wrote between 2001 and 2010. You pilot a blood-red text—the word 'poetry' or 'desire', typically. You drive it around the screen. Blue texts hunt you down. Green ones travel in random straight lines. If you run into any of them, you die. You shoot the green and blue texts. The more of them you shoot, the higher the  grey Meanometer bar gets. The game is over when the Meanometer reaches the top of the game window. Or when you are killed by a text.

Arteroids is the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness. When you shoot a text, it explodes into a circular spray of letters. Arteroids is about what happens when language is cracked open. It's an unusual poem. It's a well-engineered computer game with a good frame-rate and responsive controls. It's visual but almost entirely textual. It's sonic but the sounds are all of the human voice randomly pitch-shifted. It wonders if it's the world's first addictive poem and, if so, whether it should be proud of it. It muses with you, after you're dead or have successfully completed a level, about the relations between poetry, game, and play.

Illustration 1: 'poetry' against 'poetry' and the forces of dullness.

There's a Game Mode and a Play Mode. In Play Mode, scores are not saved to the Internet; you can create your own texts in Word for Weirdos; you can play