On Minimalism

Disclaimer: this post principally concerns minimalism in videogames, but the points I make can apply equally well to other media.

I've been playing ICO lately, and it got me to thinking about, as the title of this post suggests, minimalism. Both of Team Ico's games to date, the aforementioned ICO as well as Shadow of the Colossus, are extremely minimalist in their design sensibilities, and, in my opinion, end up being much more successful than most other, bigger games, precisely because of the lack of clutter.

ICO was specifically designed as a minimalist game based around a "boy meets girl" concept; the player, controlling a boy called Ico, encounters a mysterious girl called Yorda early on, and your goal is simply to escape the fortress you're imprisoned in. There is nothing to the game that does not need to be there; pretty much everything in the game is necessary to reaching your goal. Puzzle elements that may seem entirely irrelevant and baffling early on become vital to completing later puzzles; there are exactly three named characters in the whole game, and the story is barely there compared to the huge epic RPGs of, say, BioWare or Square Enix. It's an extremely simple, elegant game, and this is where the appeal of minimalism as a whole, not just in videogames, presents itself; the creator can omit unnecessary details and make the whole experience feel cleaner and more straightforward. The lack of other stuff to clutter up the essentials means that the work can be more focused, and arguably means that it can tell its story or convey its message more effectively than it otherwise could.

As such, because of this simplicity, ICO ends up being far more emotionally hard-hitting than the biggest, grandest BioWare RPG, precisely because it's such a simple game. The story is, as I said, hardly there at all, but the environment positively drips with atmosphere and tells a lot about the world you're in purely by being there. Indeed, it's this atmosphere and the weird little half-story that make it more than just another puzzle game, largely because much of the story is told through gameplay rather than cutscenes. There are cutscenes, and they are heartbreakingly beautiful, but the emotional impact is there entirely because of the link built between Ico and Yorda. One cutscene in particular is as powerful as it is because it incorporates aspects of the gameplay, only with your and Yorda's roles reversed; to say more would be to spoil. Yorda is frail, frightened, incapable of defending herself, and utterly dependent on Ico for protection; she's curiously childlike, and because of this you can't help but care for her, not because you've been told to, but because of the way she acts. Pretty much her entire character is conveyed through gameplay, rather than the usual videogame way of gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene where the two aspects are entirely separate from each other. The Final Fantasy series is particularly guilty of this, in that all the player does is move the characters from one cutscene to another and contributes absolutely nothing to the story; in ICO, you feel like you're part of the world, because the game doesn't feel compelled to take control away from you every time the story moves forwards.

In this regard, I suppose, videogames have unique potential with regards to minimalist design, simply because their interactive nature means that they can tell the story while having the player take part, which, in theory at least, reduces the need to have the player kicked out and merely watch the story unfold. I say in theory because this potential has largely yet to be realised, but companies like Team Ico and Valve have proven very successful at keeping the player a part of the story. I'm not saying cutscenes should be abandoned altogether; story cannot always be told through gameplay, and they're definitely a useful tool for a designer. Likewise I'm not saying everything should use minimalist design, and I like epic RPGs as much as the next person.

But it would be nice if more designers cut out the fluff, the overly complicated stat-building and the vendor trash, in favour of focussing their design on what really matters.