Almost two years ago, we covered Pac Mondrian, an interpretation of Pac-Man through the lens of modernist painter Piet Mondrian. The arts collective Prize Budget for Boys is back with another videogame/art mashup.

Calderoids is am interpretation of the classic arcade game Asteroids through the lens of American sculptor Alexander Calder. Calder is best known for inventing the mobile, kinetic sculptures that use equilibrium to counterbalance. This may come as a surprise to many of us today, who associate the mobile with baby nurseries. But it started out as an abstract art form.

Here's what Prize Budget for Boys has to say about Calderoids, which forever changes the meaning of the phrase "mobile game."

The execution is quite remarkable. The game replaces asteroids with the abstract shapes of Calder's mobiles. Destroying one splits the mobile into new arms, each with new objects attached. The whole structure balances elegantly, just like Calder's sculpture. Last term I taught a graduate game design course here at Georgia Tech on adaptation and translation for videogames. We focused on poetry, literature, and film, but Calderoids makes me realize that in the future I should also cover videogame adaptations of the fine- and plastic arts. The physicality of sculpture and painting may actually make such works easier to adapt to videogames, especially since so many existing game conventions focus on simulations of form and movement.

As with the last game, the group has created an arcade cabinet version for local exhibition. You can see it on the project page, here.