Minimalism in Gaming

Minimalism is the artistic or design sensibility of reducing everything to its barest essentials and most fundamental aspects. From the repetition of composers like Glass to the blank canvases and solid color washes of minimalist painters, there has always been a backlash against the sometimes overwrought layers of complexity present in any given field.

This is true now more than ever before for the increasingly-complex medium that is gaming. From Mass Effect's reams of branching dialogue trees to the living, breathing cities of the Grand Theft Auto games or Assassin's Creed's replica Jerusalem, most commercially successful video games involve complicated dual-analog control schemes, pages of in-game statistics, customizable classes, or photorealistic graphics. When the Xbox 360, the next-gen console with the largest current install base, has a controller with 17 buttons and two thumbsticks, and the new Tomb Raider character models have higher polygon counts than the entire original Tomb Raider game, it's often up to the less commercial world of art games to provide a countercurrent of minimalist sensibilities.

Minimalism can apply to games in a number of ways, from a sleek and simple visual style to a flawlessly streamlined system for gameplay interaction. This exhibition of games seeks to address the various ways minimalism can inform and affect different aspects of gaming.