The Second Canto of "Arteroids" is a cut-and-paste composition game. Again, it's poetry shooting at poetry; Jim's design here highlights the generative aspect of both gaming and art, how it twists into new variations with each individual in each subsequent generation; how the history (the texts themselves, received, sacrosanct if we're to believe our teachers) exist to be "played," and how the fear to play these texts and images is just what keeps EVERYONE from becoming an artist.
Jim, however, says it better than I ever could: "The bodymindplay is in the keyboard interface and how that feels. To play and game. Arteroids will have a 'play mode' and a 'game mode' (rather than canto 1, canto 2). In game mode, when you expire once, the game is over because if you expire there's no way you are going to get the score you need to advance to the next level--there is no point in continuing. To advance to the next level you have to score quite well. And if you advance, that takes you directly to the next level of play. You can also choose to exit game mode and enter play mode. In play mode, you can expire many more times before the game ends. And in play mode you can adjust the app's velocity, density, and friction, whereas these are not adjustable in game mode."
" In play mode, there is no linear advancement of the player through hierarchical levels, though the player can adjust velocity, friction, and density. Instead, the player can jump around to whatever level they wish whenever they wish, and they can edit text, create their own texts to use in arteroids (and save them to disk), change (v,f,d) before the game or during the game, make their own poems and play them through the interface, read the help, view the credits,
