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Minimalist game design was introduced a decade ago as a general design principle with a list of key properties for minimalist games: basic controls, simple but aesthetically pleasing visuals, interesting player choices with vast possibility spaces, and sounds that resonate with the design. In this paper, we present an experiment we did to explore minimalism in games using a bottom-up approach. We invited a small group of professional game designers and a larger group of game design students to participate in a seminal experiment on minimalism in game design. We started from the most basic game elements: one pixel and one key which provide the least amount of information we can display and reasonably the most elementary action players can perform. We designed a game that starts with a black pixel and asks players to press a key when the pixel turns white. This minimal game, almost a Skinner box, captures the essential elements of the mechanics of games like "The Impossible Game," which asks players to do nothing more than press a key at the right moment. We presented this game concept to the professional game designers and challenged them to create other games with the least amount of player interaction and displayed information. We did not specify any constraints (as usually done in other contexts) and left them free to express their view of minimalistic game design. We repeated the experiment with 100+ students attending a master-level course on video game design and development at our institution. We then analyzed the creations of the two groups, discussing the idea of minimalistic design that emerges from the submitted game concepts.

A weak spring is connected at one end to a rotor turning at constant angular velocity. The spring extends to a stretched length as determined by the spring mass, rest length, spring constant, rotor radius and rotor angular velocity. When released from the rotor, the inner end of the spring pulls away as expected, causing a wave to travel down the spring as it collapses. During this time interval, the outer end of the spring continues to move along its original circular path in uniform circular motion, as if the spring were still connected to the rotor. This is analogous to the effect of a hanging Slinky released from rest whose bottom end remains at a fixed position above the ground until a wave from the top of the Slinky reaches the bottom of the Slinky. Values from a numerical model and measurements from video analysis show that upon release the inner end travels along a circle of similar radius as the outer end. The effect appears as a series of alternating semi-circles. In addition, the simulation and data agree that (1) the spring extension and drag angle increase with the angular velocity of the rotor; (2) the droop angle decreases with angular velocity of the rotor; (3) the collapse time and bend angle of the collapsing spring are independent of the angular velocity., Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures