Urban Solitude, Canabalt, and minimalism

In art, minimalism is power. Artists strip an idea or a concept down to its absolute core components, using this starkness and simplicity to convey meaning to the viewer. The photo below, titled Urban Solitude, hammers home the isolation of business and urban life through this artistic style.

image credit: gdominici

There's not much there, really. There's no color. There's the mechanical platform, the guard rails, the floor, and the one businessman in the distance. That's all. There's no trickery. This isn't a visual feast for the eyes. Urban Solitude's minimalism contains just enough imagery to make its point.

Adam Atomic's Canabalt is a game steeped in this sort of minimalist design. This is the game that fundamentally shifted how I look at online games, to the point where I chose it for my avatar on this site.

With Canabalt, there's no story given. The player character, their actions, and the setting are never defined. The classic, 8-bit art style strips the game to its visual bones. Even the game's control scheme is reduced to a single button, and the game's goal reduced to "survive by jumping".

Canabalt's sheer minimalism focuses the player's attention on what's there: isolationism, oppression, and inevitability. The game world is stark, colorless, and empty. The only inhabitants the player sees are their character and giant, destructive machines. It's just you, the machines, and your run.

Those machines, never directly interacting with the player, are working to tear down the civilization. They stomp through the background, or throw bombs at the buildings the character runs across. The machines do nothing but destroy, placing them as an entropic force in the game.

The game is played with a single goal: Run. Until you die.

Death and failure is the inevitable end to this game. There's no finish line. There's no victory. There's only getting further, before you finally choke. This bleak view makes the game infinitely replayable, while driving home the lack of power the player and his avatar have in this world.

Canabalt is a perfect minimalist game. The themes it contains are well-represented, and stripped down to the core. From there, it's all up to the player to decide what the game means. What is the character's goal? Is he running away from something, or towards something? Are the robots violently destroying the city, or is this some form of strange, controlled demolition? From a scholarly perspective, should one interpret the game from a Marxist perspective? A tragic one? Historically? All of these huge interpretative options are open, because the game shows so little.

This is the power of minimalism. Canabalt challenges a player's mind more in ten minutes of play than Call of Duty does through its entire length. By presenting such a tiny window into a digital world, Canabalt asks more of the player. When I think of art and online games, this is the first example I turn to.

Go play it. See how far you can run before you finally die. See what meanings you find in Canabalt's minimalist skeleton.