Minit

Often when you sit down and think about video games, it's easy to be tempted to think more is better; more content, more duration, more missions, more objects, more micropayments ... well, the latter maybe not so much. However, parallel to this content escalation so typical of the AAA industry, it is possible to speak of the opposite; design by subtraction .

Many will be familiar with the expression for the work of Fumito Ueda as a result of his talk at the 2002 GDC. Subtraction as the main design tool seeks, precisely, to leave the skeleton and the mechanical structure of your game to a minimum with the intention of maximize your emotion, message or background. Why have four weapons if you can do the same with one? Why twelve skills if it can be two? Less is more and it can be.

Deadly of necessity because Minit gives a twist to the design by subtraction by reducing, even, the constant playing time that we will have as players; one minute; sixty seconds . That is the duration of the life of our protagonist because of a cursed sword that, like a kind of King Arthur with bad Karma, he finds on a shore. The curse of the sword will kill us exactly every sixty seconds.

This obligation of one minute = one life is still a kind of reinterpretation of the design by subtraction of Ueda taken to one of the most tricky areas of the video game; time . At the time of speaking, of speaking as people from you to you, we understand the morpheme as the minimum unit of lexical or grammatical meaning and that it cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units. If we transfer this linguistic concept to the adventure genre, one asks oneself ... what is the least that one does in a title of these characteristics? Find an object? Open a new path? Find an NPC? Defeat an enemy? Deep down, in games within Zelda's sphere of influence, the least one hopes to do with meaning within their game is any of the things mentioned.

Breath of the Wild, in its own way, also assumes it by filling its game space with actions of this type; find objects, defeat enemies, reach a new place ... practically every minute we do something. Exactly, every minute. Minit transforms the action of discovering, which could summarize all of the above, into the minimum unit of meaning for its game and limits it to one minute (and if we complete the game, it does so in 40 seconds). A minute is, for Nijman, time more than necessary for the player to perform an action with meaning and importance in Minit ... and it is. If you search the networks, you will find the odd video of players who have perfected their actions so much that they complete Minit in 25 minutes, that is, 25 well measured actions.

And is that Minit is, in its own right, one of the best-greased titles in recent months . Before sitting down in front of him one does nothing but think about how many traps the game will make to sustain a 60-second pill development; the answer is none. You don't need it because everything is built around that minimal unity of meaning. With each life, if we have used it well, we will achieve an object or shortcut that will allow us to advance a little further in less time. No cheating or cardboard; just good design and player education.

Returning now to Antrhopy's idea about mechanics, we find that Minit is taken to the letter and there is only one verb; hit with our sword . Although the action of hitting varies if we carry a bone, a shower, a camera ... everything is the same button and beyond the movement crosshead we will not need any other interaction with our environment. Everything is resolved with a single button that will vary depending on what we carry in our hands and what we have in front of us. If we carry a sword and there is an enemy we will attack, if there is a tree we will cut it or if there is a switch we will press it. Simple and effective.

To this reduction of mechanics the title adds a concise inventory that will simply affect the possibilities of our mechanics. We do not have objects that we can use beyond what we carry in our hands and everything that we collect that may be useful to us will be used automatically in case of need, thus allowing us to increase our actions; For example, without the gardening glove we cannot cut down trees and without cutting down trees, this short path is actually a long journey through the desert (attention; this can be literal).

There is only one small exception to this that reinforces Minit's design; we have a second button that we can use to end our life and reset the minute in our home. The game, fully aware of the importance of the concept; one action in one minute saves you thirty seconds of waiting in the event of an error. Because in just a few minutes our brain and way of playing will have adapted to Minit's proposal and our internal metronome will have adjusted to that of the game. We will be surprised knowing perfectly if we will have enough seconds for what we want to do or if, on the contrary, it would be a good idea to reset the minute and find a shorter route.