‘Art’eroids – Does Games and Art Merge?

Oct 13, 2013 by bganter

Arteroids is the embodiment of copywrite evasion and plagiarism. There really is nothing spectacular or novel about it. Sure the developer aimed at artifying the game by turning all object into words. Both the incoming ‘arteroids’ and the defending token are words, with only the background, explosions, and missiles fired as objects. After destroying and successfully defending myself from an incoming word, there is a strange squelch like sound issuing from the gameplay that is supposed to further establish this game as artistic. These sounds that erupt after hits are no discernable English words but do sound like painful outcries. Maybe the art in the sound was that it mimicked my internal dialogue during gameplay. It’s at this moment of artistic interpretation that I’d like to coalesce Arteroids with an illuminating article about videogames as art by Ian Bogost (titled How to do Things with Videogames). Quoting game designer Preston, Bogost argues that “art doesn’t have any sort of stable meaning.” Bogost later clarifies that “as the last century wore on, it became much harder to distinguish art by its form or function alone; context became the predominant factor, its arbitrariness exposed forever by Duchamp’s urinal.” The last reference is to an alleged artist that took a picture of a urinal, had the photo printed, and signing the photo exhibited it as art. I have to agree with Bogost in his article that there doesn’t seem to be a linear cut on the boundaries to define art. So merging my views on art with Bogost, it really could be argued that Arteroids is (sarcastic) exquisitely beautiful and highly original.

Bogost does offer some help for the seemingly derailed developer of Arteroids. He does this by coming up with a new classification system for artistic games like Arteroids – Proceduralist games. Unfortunately, Bogost is a little inept at articulating the concise description of what a proceduralist game entails. It seems to me that they would not be played merely for fun in a traditional vegetative state, nor be abstract alone either. Proceduralist games seem to carefully sit on the fence between simulation games and metaphoric poetic games, but all while maintaining introspection. Arteroids would qualify as a proceduralist game as I have the goal of protecting my central word, while simultaneously showing some abstractness. Ultimately it caused me to think about the meaning of the game, if there are more features in later levels, and what could be other ways to play. I tried to see if destroying certain words in order to form sentences would cause variations in gameplay. I tried various usernames to see if it would affect the outcome. Sadly, none of these introspective guesses made any differences appear.

About the same time that I played Arteroids, I found another game on sale at Steam. It normally costs $9.99, but it was on sale at 90% off. World of Goo was only 99c and I decided to try it. First there was enjoyable gameplay with some clearly objective goals and physics. There was even some artistic narrative. The feeling I felt while playing World of Goo was similar to the feeling I experienced while watching Tim Burton’s 2009 movie “9”. Now this game is an exemplary view of art and games forming a hybrid that could even possibly fulfil Bogost’s criteria for proceduralistic games in my opinion. It further made me wonder if another indie game called Eufloria could qualify. In Eufloria, I start each level with a few “seedlings” which I could colonize, defend, or build with. It is meant as a soothing Zen game with accompanying music, and relatively relaxing gameplay. Overall I wondered if all Indi games could fill the criteria of proceduralist games, though I had no doubt that they all can be seen as art.