Brevity, Minimalist Poetry, and the shortest possible videogame

Originally delivered on the 11th of June, 2026 at the Multiplatform 2026: Poetry in Games/Games in Poetry symposium, hosted by the Manchester Game Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Hi everyone, my name is Liam Gibbons, I’m a game maker and scholar at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, living and working on Boon Wurrung country. I’m exhibiting a creative work at the symposium, so I’d like to spend my time today giving you a bit of background on the game, what I was thinking and playing with when I made it, and how it has helped me to think through my relationship to videogame form through poetic ideas, approaches, and structures. The work is entitled Brevity, and it emerged as part of my research and practice in reflective, short form game design. This was a key focus of my PhD about 5 years ago, and it’s how I frame everything I do and produce in my game making practice. In essence, I make games that are very short, typically taking anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to play through in their entirety. These games are reflective, which is to say I aim to produce slower, more calm and contemplative affects and forms of play with them. This is in contrast to the more immediate, reaction-based affects and play experiences that are typical of short form game design, particularly visible in the WarioWare series of microgames. Key to my practice is the notion of limits and constraints. Rather than pushing back against technical, conceptual, and aesthetic limits, I embrace them, and I deliberately create games that are small-scale, short, and simple across time, space, and ludic elements and systems.

As part of these explorations into deliberate, intentional limits and constraints in game design and making, I pretty quickly — and perhaps inevitably — made my way to asking what the most limited form of a game could be. I set myself the challenge of creating the shortest video game possible, inspired by things like the shortest video on YouTube, Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square (1950 - 1976) series, and the White Stripe’s One Note show, in which they got up on stage, played a single note as a band, and left. I was also drawing from the work of minimalist painters and sculptors such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris, particularly in their choreographic manipulation of empty space and plain aesthetics. In order to reduce down to the extreme limits of video game form and duration, I first had to establish a baseline for what I considered a game to be. For this I turned to the definitions that I was presented with as a young game design student, which in turn were primarily drawn from those early game design textbooks of the mid-to-late 2000s. This included Jesse Schell’s “A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude” (pp. 37), from The Art of Game Design (2008), Tracy Fullerton’s “A closed, formal system in which players engage in an artificial conflict and resolves its uncertainty in an unequal outcome” (pp. 43), from Game Design Workshop (2008), and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s “a game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (pp. 80), from Rules of Play (2004).

Of course, there are many more definitions than this: some much more open, some much more proscriptive, and many more have been offered in the almost 20 years since many of these books were first published, these were just the ones I selected. From these, I looked for the commonalities and listed them out in an attempt to identify the core, essential features of a videogame, in order to inform the design of this extremely short videogame, while maintaining its status as a video game. Of course, I found quite swiftly that such a definitive list is difficult to produce comprehensively, definitions are often ideologically motivated, and the essence of a video game changes from definition to definition, but it was at least a place to start. Certain words, such as “system”, “artificial”, “conflict”, and “outcome” are common between these definitions, as are ideas about how we approach and structure the core activity of interacting with and within a game — that is, largely in a playful way, bound by a system of rules. With all of this in mind, my aim was to have the game be as stripped back and minimal in all other aspects as possible: sound, visuals, input, output, and form. Drawing from those minimalist sculptors like Judd and Morris, this was largely to focus the player’s efforts and attention. If there was only one visual element to focus on, and one input to make, the player wouldn’t have to waste time trying to read or understand the system, or to try to figure out what to do.

Drawing from Albers in particular, I set up a single black square in the game engine Unity, set against a white background. I attached a simple script, which would reverse the colours of both the square and the background when it was clicked once, and set it to play a single, brief sound, which I will show you now. That’s the game in its entirety: one square, one background, one sound, one input, and one output. To reflect its extreme short form, I decided to call it Brevity. Once it was finished, which of course also didn’t take very long, I reflected on the work and the process of making it, and came to some interesting observations. Had I succeeded in making the shortest videogame possible? That depended on when we considered the “game” to have happened. From the player’s perspective, when does the game begin, and when does it end? Does the game start when we open up the application on our computer, when we first touch the mouse, or at another time? Does it end when we see the one and only outcome, or when we close the application or webpage and terminate the program? Or does the game begin and then end in the split second it takes to click the square, the computer to process that input, the pixels on the screen to invert from black to white, the speakers to play the sound, and our eyes, ears, and brain to register that change? If so, it certainly could be the shortest game possible, but what if we consider the game to have begun when we open the application?

In that case, what if a player opened it but never clicked the square — this could potentially make it a very long videogame. How we interpret the sequence of events also has implications on how we understand the work as a whole. Is this a very basic first-person shooter? Is this a really easy puzzle game? Is this an extremely minimal and impressionistic narrative adventure? Ultimately, this all circles back to the most fundamental question: is this a game at all? To me, the answer is yes, as long as we are open minded about our understanding of what a game is, and what a game can be. I’m not necessarily advocating for throwing out definitions entirely, or saying that form should be a free-for-all, but simply that definitions should be malleable, extendable, and adaptable in order to remain functional and useful. Terms such as “conflict”, “rules”, and “outcomes” already have multiple, varied meanings between different genres, designers, and individual games anyway, and already manifest in different ways. A reward, for instance, can take many forms: digital currency such as gold in a game like World of Warcraft (2004 - Present), a new ability in a game like Assassin’s Creed Mirage (2023), or a unique view from the top of a mountain in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). In a similar way, conflict is present in Brevity in the sharp tonal contrast of the foreground and background, whereas it might be present in the violent interaction between players in a multiplayer match of Call of Duty. The switch between black and white is also the unequal, quantified outcome — if we wanted to, we could also understand this to be a reward, or a punishment, depending on our perspective. Likewise, the act of clicking on the square is not only the game’s single input, but also it’s sole objective, challenge, and obstacle.

Very quickly, this became the thing that Brevity offered me as a designer, and hopefully others: not an essentialist statement of what a game does and doesn’t consistent of, but a way to evolve our understanding of what a game can be. This where I make the connection to poetry, and in particular, the minimalist, experimental poetry of people like John W. (Or jw) Curry and Aram Saroyan. Like Brevity, this is poetry that is stripped back to its core, often consisting of a single word or even a single letter, and adjacent to concrete poetry where the visual arrangement and composition of the poem is just as, or perhaps even more important than the content of the text. In MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing (1997), mathematical poet and critic Bob Grumman defines a minimalist poem as one that gets “its job done in as few words as possible — generally but not always through the use of visual techniques” (para 1). Indeed, in describing his own minimalist poem, which for the purposes of this presentation I will be pronouncing as “light”, Saroyan states that it is a poem that you “see rather than read”. In other words, unlike other poems that have a beginning, middle, and an end, lighght “doesn’t have a reading process”. This emphasis on the instantaneous and the visual is perhaps unsurprising given the multidisciplinarity of practitioners like Saroyan, who worked across poetry, prose, memoir, playwriting, and the visual arts throughout his career, and the poem has resonances with the immediate impression that a minimalist sculpture from Judd or Morris is designed to provoke.

This immediacy was also a key influence on Brevity of course, particularly in the idea of the entirety of a game occurring in the split second it takes for the player’s finger to press down on the mouse button, and the computer to register and respond to that input. This immediacy and focus on the visual is what made lighght so seminal, but also somewhat controversial. As recounted by Ian Daly in You Call That Poetry?! (2007), the poem was swept up in a storm of controversy when the American National Endowment for the Arts (the NEA) included it in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology, which came with a $750 payment. Soon after, the poem became the centre of a national campaign against the wastefulness of the NEA, with certain members of Congress demanding the removal of its chairperson and explanations for why the government was paying for a single, misspelled word. You don’t have to look far in games culture to find similar discussions surrounding duration and monetary value, as I’ll discuss later on. Another of Saroyan’s poems also attracted a lot of attention, but for more positive reasons. This is mn, which currently holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s shortest poem. As you can see, it’s not quite a spelling mistake, but it does play with error and unexpected surprise in interesting ways: it could conceivably be a visual glitch or a misprint. Grumman describes it as “the centre of an alphabet just starting to form, between its m and n”. Then, there’s jwcurry’s i, which is where things really start to get interesting.

The poem consists of a block of black ink with a human thumbprint situated above it, broadly in the shape of a lower-case “i” in the English alphabet. Because the work is so limited, each of these design decisions really matter — perhaps more so than in even larger and more complicated works. Anything added to or removed from the composition has dramatic impacts on its messaging, affect, and duration. For instance, while the version of Brevity that I showed earlier is so brief as to be near instantaneous, the version that I’m exhibiting during the symposium is actually quite different. In order to facilitate exhibition while I’m not there, I programmed in a reset function, so after a certain amount of time the game will reset itself back to its initial state. This was initially to avoid people having to manually reset it every time someone clicked on the square, but I recognised pretty immediately that this also meant one player could play it over and over again. I tinkered with this and added a random timer, so the game would reset randomly between every 3 to 7 seconds, which I’ll demonstrate now. As you can see, not only does this turn a very short experience into a potentially long one, but it also changes the character of that experience. The game now has elements — or at least shades of — competition, turns, and a rudimentary form of artificial intelligence. At this level of design granularity, tiny decisions ripple upwards and have big impacts.

In other words, the character of the play experience is made unstable and malleable by extreme formal reduction: able to be shaped and changed with very small and very few adjustments. Indeed, at this level of reduction, the formal containers that we place around these works become less and less useful. Is Brevity a videogame, or is it a simple interactive? Where does the distinction between these two forms ultimately lie? In how the work is framed by the designer and/or approached by the audience, i.e: playfully vs seriously? Is it in the tools that were used to make it? Would Brevity be less of a game if I had made it with HTML and embedded it in the middle of a blank webpage, rather than using the Unity game engine to create it, as I did? Similar questions could be, and were asked of those earlier minimalist poems. Jwcurry’s i and Saroyan’s mn could be described as images or as pieces of typography just as much as they could letters or poems. As mentioned earlier, while Saroyan understood lighght very explicitly as a poem, as did the editors of The American Literary Anthology, others understood it as a misspelled word and a waste of money. It’s clear that at this level of reduction, these works could be understood in many different ways, which perhaps leads us to asking what is the most appropriate, or most accurate way to understand and describe them. To me however, this is the wrong question to be asking.

Indeed, in discussing these minimalist poems, Grumman understands them not as essentialist claims about what a poem is and isn’t, but as “craft-expanding poetry”. That is to say that by deliberately playing at and with the boundaries and margins of poetic form, these poems lead us away from convention and attempt to tease out the new. There is no doubt that it can be challenging for a reader to encounter such stripped-back poems though, as the Congressional response to Saroyan’s lighght demonstrated earlier. Grumman himself reports some initial discomfort and even antagonism towards some of these poems, even as he attempts to map out the landscape of the movement. For instance, he states that he has “much sympathy for anyone whose response to [John Byrum’s Utter] is consternation. What in the world is the point of it?” He also states that he initially felt outright adversarial when encountering this poem from Geof Huth. It wasn’t until he really looked at it, and noticed how important the word and concept of an “echo” is to the poem’s construction, that he truly appreciated it. This insight opened up an interpretation that included everything from the echoing of certain sounds in the words, to the “dance” of the letters, to the broader conceptual dichotomy of the concepts of an echo, or a copy, and a choice. So while it’s tempting, perhaps even understandable, for readers and critics to see these works as oddities, novelties, or even jokes, it’s in this discomfort and challenge that the value of this kind of poetry, and game design, actually lies.

We can see this particularly when we circle back to games. It’s something that I deliberately play with in my practice with games like Brevity, but we don’t have to look far in contemporary games discourse to see similar ideas and debates playing out. For instance, take the recent “controversy” around Mixtape (2026), a narrative and music-focused adventure game in which you play as a group of teenagers just after finishing high school. There’s no doubt that much of this controversy derives from the baggage of gendered, culture war provocations, along with some good old fashioned conspiracy theories surrounding the game’s publisher Annapurna. However, at least part of the uproar was a result of IGN giving the game a perfect 10/10 score, given that some players consider it more of a film rather than a game due to the heavily reliance on cutscenes, short narrative sequences with very few prompts for input and few or no fail states. While I haven’t played Mixtape myself yet, I can somewhat sympathise with these players through my own experiences with the 2016 mystery adventure game Virginia. The game casts players as an FBI agent investigating the disappearance of a child in a rural town, and like Mixtape takes a very unconventional approach to interactive and narrative design and momentum. Completely dialogue-free, throughout much of the game the player is simply walking through the virtual environments, looking at emoting non-player characters, and searching for and interacting with objects.

Perhaps the most compelling part of its design is its approach to spatial and narrative cohesion: drawing from Brendan Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving (2012), the game will constantly cut or fade forward in time, abruptly teleporting the player forward often to a completely different location. I’ll be the first to admit that I totally bounced off this approach the first time that I played it. I found it to be deeply incoherent as a narrative experience, and thoroughly unsatisfying as an interactive one. I never felt in control of my actions and was left thinking, “how is this a game?” However, like Grumman looking deeper at Huth’s poem, I reconsidered my view: I might not think it was a particularly cohesive or satisfying experience, but it was certainly an interesting one. Maybe “how is this a game?” doesn’t have to be a backward-facing, essentialist question born of frustration, but an exciting, exploratory, forward-facing one. It’s not about whether works like Mixtape, Virginia, and Brevity do or not count as games, but how they change our understanding of what games can be, just as the work of Curry and Saroyan did, in their own small ways, for poetry. This, to me, is the value of these kinds of minimalist, craft-extending games. I’m not going to claim that Brevity is a particularly compelling or satisfying gameplay experience. But as a prompt, as a challenge, and as a question, it can push us to reflect and expand upon what games are, can be, and how they can be constructed in different ways to express different things and offer different experiences.

Sure, it doesn’t have a traditional fail state, but Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980) don’t have traditional victory states — the goal isn’t to win, it’s to not lose for as long as possible. Do we think of either of those as anything less than games? I want to finish by highlighting one final passage from the Grumman article, where he outlines what he sees in the Saroyan poem lighght. In referring to the poem’s detractors, he states that:

“Merely glancing at it, they judge its key element, the extra “gh,” a petty eccentricity designed to shock, or a hoax calculated to win the esteem that obscurity-for-obscurity’s-sake too often receives from academics. They are seriously wrong: the extra “gh” is neither trivial nor obscure. By putting it into his word, Saroyan brings us face-to-face with the ineffability of light, a mysterious substance whose components are somehow there but absent, as “ghgh” is there (and delicately shimmering) but unpronounced in the word, “lighght.” And he leaves us with intimations of his single syllable of light’s expanding, silent and weightlessly, “gh” by “gh” into final illumination” (para 57).

This to me describes the other, untapped potentials of this kind of minimalist game design. Not only can it play with convention and formal boundaries, but its deliberate use of extreme formal reduction and sparseness can cast the fundamental elements of a particular game’s construction into the light, allowing us to examine them in order to understand what games can do, why they’re interesting, and how the craft can evolve. As Grumman points to, the minimalist approach also has the potential to express what can’t be expressed in other forms. By inviting in other media, approaches, and ideas, it can expand, not shrink what videogames are and can be. So hopefully you’ll get a chance to try out Brevity at the symposium, and I hope you’ll keep all of this in mind as you do. Thank you.