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.

Ico

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is widely considered one of the most popular and critically-well-received games of all time, but it is undeniably complex. It tells the story of an unspeaking little boy who must solve large environmental puzzles to save a young princess, but it does so in the mold of a traditional monomyth. Along the way, young Link acquires a multitude of useful and bizarre items - arrows, bombs, a boomerang, a magical fairy flute, a hookshot, metal boots, magical alternate outfits, masks, even a teleporting scarecrow - and becomes a master swordsman, all while Koji Kondo's famous soundtrack lends the proceedings a bright, epic feel.


There's no denying the huge debt of inspiration Ocarina is owed by Ico, the first art game from the development team Team ICO and their leader, the auteur Fumito Ueda. Ico similarly tells the tale of a little boy who must solve huge puzzles to save a princess, and the puzzles from either game could fit in just as well in the other. What makes Ico different is that it strips out all the excess and reimagines the narrative through minimalism. Where Ocarina required the use of 11 buttons and an analog stick, you can beat Ico with just an analog stick and 4 buttons. Where Link's enormous inventory made him practically a walking pawnshop, Ico can only carry one thing at a time - for most of the game, a wooden stick. Where Ocarina flooded the screen with a cluttered, icon-heavy HUD, Ico's screen is entirely free of weapon icons or health meters. And where Kondo's score left legions of gamers humming the Lost Woods theme for years, Ico is almost entirely silent.


Ueda uses this minimalism in Ico to two main artistic effects, both relatively absent in most traditional fantasy adventure games, like Ocarina of Time: realism and loneliness. The young protagonist, Ico, is inexperienced and inept, and when he perseveres, it's largely through sheer luck or persistence - this is because his abilities in the game are limited to what an average boy of his age and size could do. He stumbles, drops things, and fights by clumsily hitting things with his stick - even the smallest enemies can easily knock him sprawling with a single blow. Another interesting minimalist touch is that Ico and Princess Yorda speak entirely different languages and so cannot communicate with one another - their relationship, the central focus of Ico, is developed almost entirely through unspoken gestures. Ico guides Yorda by holding her hand, and he catches her and pulls her and helps her up ladders. When the player saves the game, Ico and Yorda fall asleep holding hands on a stone couch. Significantly, this all occurs without any incidental music - all that can be heard is the wind hitting the stone walls of the castle, the charaters' footsteps, the distant sea.

The end effect of this minimalism is a bleak, unremitting loneliness. The castle is gigantic, empty, and largely silent, and the silence builds to an almost tangible negative space, punctuated only by bird calls or Ico's own panting as he climbs. The entire last couple hours of the game have no save points, forcing the player to complete them in one shot - an artistic choice of Ueda's meant to position the terribly sad ending in the context of two-hours of loneliness and near-complete-silence that only lends it more weight. The game's entire script fits on half a page of normal text, but Ueda's silences and simplicity, which he himself called the "Subtraction Method", convey the story far more effectively than words.


Artist: Fumito Ueda, Team ICO
Medium: PlayStation 2 software
Year: 2001

Artist Statement:
"I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination is sometimes stimulated more as I don't understand the language, I get less of the picture. ICO is a game which intentionally tries to achieve this effect."

Bibliography:
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3144548
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3144673
http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com/icosotc/ico.htm
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3122598
http://top100.ign.com/2005/011-020.html

Samorost

While it would be somewhat of a mistake to label the lushly-drawn web-browser game Samorost as aesthetically minimalist, it represents what is potentially the most minimalist interface and interaction system possible. The game is played entirely with the mouse and a single mouse button - to interact with an object, move your character, or perform an action of any sort, you just click once on it. Everything that happens, from piloting a spaceship to using a key-shaped hookah to unlock a ski lift control, happens with just a single click from the player. This creates an interesting relationship of interactivity between the player and the events occurring in the game - while the specific order of clicking and puzzle-solving necessary to complete Samorost clearly demarcate it as a game, the player, much like the tiny main character who is often seemingly lost and swept along by the events that occur, is never exactly sure what their disconnected clicks will set in motion.


Artist: Jakub Dvorsky
Medium: Internet browser game (http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/)
Year: 2003

Artist Statement:
"I do not want any words. There will be some communication, but only with symbols, pictures and animations."

Bibliography:
http://coldhardflash.com/2005/02/brno-inferno.html
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,593
http://www.splatterlink.com/interviews/samorost.htm
http://www.artificial.dk/articles/amanita.htm

Orisinal

Ferry Halim's Orisinal project functions well as an exercise in minimalism. It is a collection of 59 browser-based art games, each one functioning with the bare minimum of elements it needs to both constitute a game and create a personal atmosphere. Many of the small games feature beautiful loops of spare but evotionally evocative piano music, and the artwork is simple, subdued, and very stylized. In the end they function like incredibly short stories, a few sentences each, every one leaving a definite impression (and, thanks to a simple scoring function, many of them infinitely replayable), minimal in execution and tiny in scope as they are.


Artist: Ferry Halim
Medium: Internet browser games (http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/)
Year: 2000-2001

Artist Statement:
"A game is not always complicated. Simple fun is the most important thing."

Bibliography:
http://cordblomquist.com/articles/61/1/Ferry-Halimas-Engrossing-World-of-Flash-Games/Page1.html
http://jayisgames.com/tag/orisinal
http://www.freegamesnews.com/en/?p=107

OLE Coordinate System

The OLE Coordinate System has an incredibly minimalist graphical style - paths are represented as 3d white blocks denoted from their blank white surroundings by simple black lines, and the only characters are faceless mannequin figures who walk like lemmings straight down the paths. OLECS is incredibly minimalist in terms of gameplay goals as well - by rotating the blocks to create optical illusions much like those in the work of M.C. Escher, the player can create impossible paths for the people to walk across to prevent them from falling. Interestingly, however, there are no predesigned levels to complete or puzzles to solve - much as in a game like SimCity, the level must first be built by the player, as simple, complex, easy, or challenging as they would like. In fact, all the game gives you to start out with is a blank canvas and your imagination. This serves an important purpose, however - by stripping away everything inessential and giving the player ultimate freedom with very simple building blocks, OLECS takes what could be a confusing, mind-twisting conceit with potentially frustrating controls - rotate the puzzle levels just the right way with the right timing to keep the people from falling - and lets the player figure out the illusions and lateral thinking at just their own pace, shifting the challenge from a mechanical one to one of devising and discovering new possible illusions. Here, the minimalism defines the entire nature of the gameplay itself.


Artist: Jun Fujiki
Medium: Internet downloadable game (http://tserve01.aid.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~fujiki/ole_coordinate_system/index.html)
Year: 2000-2001

Artist Statement:
"Is it a two dimensional level surface, a three dimensional space, or an image perceived in the mind and displayed on the computer screen? This award-winning work shows us that the mysteries of the inscrutable structural world, such as those made famous by Escher’s works, can be solved simply by placing blocks. The great thing about this work is that it is simple and available to everyone."

Bibliography:
http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/english/festival/2006/art/000496/index.php
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2007/07/ole_coordinate_system.html

Mondo Agency

Mondo Agency uses minimalism incredibly well to disorient the player and create its atmosphere of extremely unsettling psychological horror. The graphics are initially entirely in black, white, and dark gray, leaving all surfaces untextured, blank, and eerily dark. Aurally as well, the only sound in the beginning of the game is your own character's footsteps and breathing over a textured soundscape of white noise and static. In between levels, eerie videos show a creepy figure with a TV-cube head speaking in an old-sounding recording of a foreign language, while subtitled text with intentionally terrible grammar communicates his oftentimes unintelligible ranting. The gameplay is minimalist as well - one main concept determines the challenge in each level (or "submmission"), be it mountains or paths or massacres, and the concept is directly linked to the TV-man's pre-level ranting. All of these unique and minimal choices add up to an experience that entirely disorients the player and makes them feel incredibly, intensely uncomfortable from the get-go, but perhaps the most genius choice within Cactus's minimalism is the subtle disruptions he introduces - red blood, for instance, or the startling distorted screaming of the TV-heads later in the game. With so few elements to begin with, new additions take on a frightening power.


Artist: Cactus
Medium: Internet downloadable game (http://www.cactus-soft.co.nr/)
Year: 2007

Artist Statement:
"Welcome to Mondo Agency! An eerie cyber FPS with horror and puzzle elements. As an agent it is your mission to kill laser indians and save the president! Turn off your lights and turn up your speakers for maximum enjoyment!"

Bibliography:
http://www.retroremakes.com/wordpress/2008/01/08/mondo-agency/
http://www.gamelab.com/reports/2008-jan-indy_interview_cactus
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/articles/index.php?c=ca&y=2007&gid=6

game, game, game and again game

From an aesthetic perspective, game, game, game and again game is the antithesis of minimalism - its look is cluttered, packed with fragments of often-unrelated text, imagery, and short video clips designed to obscure the game itself. At the same time, its gameplay counterbalances the visual complexity with absolute simplicity. Even beyond the simplistic arrow-keys-and-space-bar control system, the object of each level is the same - maneuver your dot along the path to the door. The entirety of the game's challenge is in seeing your way through the collage of visual and textual detritus. Heavy-handed sermonizing and willfully esoteric poetry aside, game, game, game and again game works as an intriguing demonstration of the versatility of minimalist gameplay - simply by altering the path taken and swapping out the art/text assets, the basic task of guiding a dot to a door can become a comment on drug-induced confusion, a demonstration of the capitalist cycle, or a chronicle of one dot's rise and fall.


Artist: Jason Nelson
Medium: Internet browser game (http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/agame.html)
Year: 2007

Artist Statement:
"My goal was: how can I transform my own crazy writings and ideas into an artwork that the public, your average 18 year old kid, could engage with. And a game format seemed like the most logical idea....Most games have specific goals and consequences, competitions, and scores. But with my work, I might have consequences in the vein of responses to user actions, but I find the notions of competition and score to be largely societal conceptions, false premises for cultural conquest."

Bibliography:
http://jayisgames.com/archives/2007/05/game_game_game_and_again_game.php
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/multimedia/reviews/55649/game-game-game-and-again-game/
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/wildness-in-corner-discussion-with.html
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/litarture/86650/1