The Game of Art

My generation grew up through Atari. While I myself was far too "intellectual" (read:snobbish) to delve deeply into computer games, my friends were all closeting themselves in their living rooms, calculating how many lives they had left before the space invaders swayed down the screen and successfully occupied our poor planet Earth.

In college, my roommates were game-geeks. We had every gaming system imaginable; Nintendo 64, old Sega systems, the Dreamcast, etc. etc. As the resident poet of the group, I scowled whenever I noticed one of them was spending eight to nine hours a day with a game controller in his hand. "Fool!" I would murmur to myself, alone in my room hunched over my word processor. "Why not do something productive, like write poetry?"

Of course, my attitude toward computer and video games at the time was perfectly indicative of the old "high culture/low culture" dichotomy that I was, as a good postmodernist, supposed to be bridging. Games, after all, were not art; they were just another example of a consumer culture growing steadily more digital as time went on and the fluidity of the computer became more and more apparent. Sure, Andy could paint a soup can, call it art, and make it so; but these computer games, with their virtual fulfillment of primitive competitive impulses, they could certainly never become as weighted with cultural significance as, say, Duchamp.

"...there are different types of play, 'art' being involved most prestigiously in non-game play, previously." Jim Andrews writes in a recent post to the list-serv Webartery. He is the author of the Shockwave art-game "Arteroids," currently at home at http://webartery.com/arteroids . "...the challenge of the artgame is to be as widely playful as possible, in artplay, soundplay, bodymindplay, readingplay, writingplay, imageplay, competitiplay, communiplay, transactiplay, metaplay, and many more. some might add enaughtyplay, for instance."

Jim's piece has thoroughly convinced me that there is very little difference between art and game. "Arteroids" plays at that crosshair intesection between a pure, competitiion-driven shoot-'em-up game and a weird sort of morphing poem. In the first Canto, "Arteroids" is pure textual Duke Nukem: you are in control of the poetry gun, which, when you hit the spacebar, shoots as you dodge and attempt to eradicate the word "poetry." The gun itself

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