" Further, when the game's velocity is low, you can read the text. And
you will have more opportunity to choose the sounds you play, so you can play
musically with the interface more leisurely at low velocity, so you create a
kind of visual totally textual and sound poem. This is very much artplay. It
would be great to be able to record games and send them to people as screensavers.
Perhaps I can get it to email texts and a url to the game. Hmm...."
If this sounds something like a philosophy, it is. I personally can't seem to
advance past the first level in the game; my previous eschewing of games has
rendered my skills here more than inadequate. Poetry always ends up killing
me; at last count, my score was in the negative range. My accruacy (yes, "Arteroids"
keeps statistics!) was 00.00%. My chances of reaching nirvana are nil.
That last sentence isn't facetious. In many ways, I see the level-system in "Arteroids" similar to the path toward enlightenment in the buddhistic faiths; one slowly sheds image after image, desire after desire, craving after craving, until one becomes the essence that is no essence at all, the pure motionless pulse of the universe itself. This is what I believe pieces like "Arteroids" seek to teach us. The fact that the piece does use statistics isn't a concession to the competitive lower-level of gaming; it, like everything else, is maya, unreal; you can only advance once you've shed the desire to advance. By desiring to advance, to unlock the secret of "Arteroids,' I betrayed its true mission; to teach me to live within it, to savor its motion as opposed to seeking to control it. ArtPlay like "Arteroids" best succeeds when one doesn't seek anything at all from it, not even the experience of it; when one opens the file indifferently, as if opening the file were one piece of respiration itself, almost involuntary, certainly nothing to get upset about.
Jim Andrews also has a quite enlightening site entitled Vispo, which can be found at http://www.vispo.com/
