The Fundamental Structure of All things and videogame minimalism

In my game The Fundamental Structure of All Things, the player moves a small geometric circle around the screen space, pairs up with other circles as they appear, and decouples from them whenever they like. After five minutes, regardless of the player’s actions, the game ends. I want to use this lighting talk to discuss it as an expression of what I’ve been thinking about and exploring lately through my game making practice and research, that is both hobbyist and minimalist. I understand hobbyist game making to be a practice where financial gain is not the primary motivation. This is not to imply that money is not a motivating factor at all, or that hobbyist game making is unfunded: simply that the results of that practice are not the primary source of income. Because of this reduced concern for marketability and financial gain, I maintain that a hobbyist game making practice is a particularly fruitful site for experimental, exploratory, even provocative game making practices.

One such practice, minimalist game design, has intersected with independent and hobbyist game making at various points throughout game studies and design history. Most notably, Boxerman, Nealen, and Saltsman’s Towards minimalist game design describes a game making practice that privileges “small rulesets, narrow decision spaces, and abstract audiovisual representations”, with Saltsman’s endless runner Canabalt serving as a key example. They also offer other benefits of a minimalist approach to game design, including inviting the player into the meaning-making process through interpretation, and reducing time and labour demands for small teams and solo game makers. They also claim that “self-imposed, deliberate constraints on both the design process and [the] game are an important component to exploring new types of games and play”, yet they don’t quite speak to how or why this is the case. This is what I’m particularly interested in, and to do so, I turn to the original minimalists.

Here I’m referring to the work of a group of sculptors in New York in the early 1960’s. While varying widely in approach and motivation, one of the unifying ideals of these artists was to position art as an object in the world, rather than as a distanced, separate window into an illusion of a world. They did this by producing sculpture that was designed to be as plain, inert, and mute as possible, in order to deflect attention off the work and to activate the space and situation surrounding them. Therefore, while formal reduction and aesthetic simplicity were key tactics of the minimalists, they were not the end goals of their activity. Rather, as Schjeldahl notes, the “cardinal features of minimalist thinking … [were] phenomenology, a sense of contexts, [and] criticality”. In this last regard, minimalist work was designed to be provocative — to illicit a reaction. There are many accounts of visitors encountering a work such as Donald Judd’s Galvanised Iron 17 here, and asking some variation of “where is the art?/is this art?/how is this art?”. These questions were prompted by the minimalist’s refreshing disregard for categorisation: not only between artwork and object, but also between genre and form. They created paintings that were sculptural in their use of thick paint and extended canvases, and sculptures that were placed on the wall like paintings.

It is in these in-between states, at the margins of accepted form — where hobbyists can so effectively operate — that the new so often emerges. Like walking simulators, visual novels, and many other independent and artgames before it, I designed my game to operate at the margins of traditional or dogmatic videogame form. It is so minimal, so reduced, that is straddles the line between videogame and interactive design, unable to sit comfortably in either category. I don’t do this to identify and claim the “essential” features of either, but rather to leverage minimalist game design as a mode of creative inquiry. That is, a way of exploring how a game can resolve beyond the binaries of winning or losing, or how cooperation can occur outside of reward and punishment structures. To continue to press at the boundaries of narrative cohesion, or the necessity of conventional mastery and challenge. I acknowledge that I’m not alone in exploring these creative propositions, but I also acknowledge that many game players find them confronting. Rather than simply pushing back and trying to justify the “gaminess” of my work, I’m interested in deliberately prompting and maintaining that moment of ontological discomfort, in using it as an opportunity to reflect, rather than to reject. So I invite you to play the game, and indeed to ask “is this a game”, or “how is this a game?”. I’m not necessarily offering or even expecting answers to these questions, but it is in the questioning that we can continue to open up our understanding of what games can be, rather than close it off.