When you sit down to write a book, one of the most important things to bear in mind is the shaping and formation of your expression: if you can elegantly express in a single sentence what a lesser writer would need a paragraph to evoke, then you've got yourself a talent for writing.

Good journalism, similarly, is all about the brevity of your expression: a focus on the points that matter — and the arrangement of said points — to create a concise and informative read for your audience without leaving anything out. The importance of this is clearest in news briefs and other environments where every individual word that you place needs to hold significance.

This advice has been thoroughly rammed into the veteran noggins of writers, architects, musicians and countless other disciplines which respect minimalisation when it comes to polishing work. The question of "Does that really need to be there?" even extends to the field of programming, where a job not only needs to be performed correctly, but efficiently as well.

This, of course, begs the question: does such advice extend to the nebulous realm of game design? Is minimalism the mark of a good game designer? If so, where do we draw the line?

The challenge posed

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, a French writer and aviator, once stated the following:

He wasn't talking about game design specifically (the gent was a bit before our time), but it's interesting food for thought. Does the additive process harm good game design? Does our job consist of actively cutting away weaker elements, rather than just adding new ones? Or is it an alternative concoction that can't be so easily labelled?

The indie slant

This statement may come across as somewhat myopic, but it seems logical that indies in particular would have to think about keeping elaboration to a minimum over the course of a game project. The idea of "adding this and that" won't fly in a situation where the team's size, budget and dev time is limited, and one would sooner see a simple, experimental game taking flight than any kind of successor to World of Warcraft. An indie's project needs to be smaller, and only the most important design ideas will survive in the torrid landscape of "cool things to add to the game".

World of Warcraft succeeded in creating a complex and rewarding game experience. But does this translate well to indie projects?

That said, there's still a wide base of views held by independent game developers regarding design minimalism. Some support the notion, others hold that it isn't necessary for a good game at all.

Common consensus holds that minimalism in terms of user interfaces and information systems is a must. No matter what the complexity of the system itself may be, the most important information needs to be selected and put on display for the user. Thus, having a health bar that changes colour with status effects would be superior to having both a health bar and a status message next to it (further elaboration of this concept over here).

But when it comes to that system itself — the rules which the UI, for example, would draw from — what do we do?