We could take the minions to be unlucky and without will to live, but I felt the interesting question that you highlight is whether there can be an absurdist or surrealist simulationist game? One option is to say it's impossible, albeit it is likely intuitions will diverge as to what counts as absurdist or surrealist (are not many of the fantastical worlds of RPG to some extent absurd?)
I think the issue can be more of when one becomes too alien for people to engage with than absurd per se. At that point, while it might be possible to do it in a simulationist sort of way, I suspect the posture the game takes is the least of anyone's concern in that case.
Suppose we agree that a gamist design is one that is easy and engaging/interesting to do. Do we then agree that a simulationist - being not gamist - must be one that is not easy and not engaging/not interesting to do?
This, in a way, mirrors a perennial argument that took place back in r.g.f.a.: are the postures fundamentally incompatible? I never thought they were, but that there were absolutely tradeoffs as you pursued one over the others, and if you heavily pursued two, you were going to more and more squeeze the third out.
But of course I also think you never see just one in the wild; you have games that strongly chase one, but they don't end up entirely excluding the others.
I think usually with gamism the tension is much greater between keeping it engaging on a game level and easy to manage at the same time; there are obviously different sweet spots that work for different people, but the people who find really simple games engaging, if you dig into it, do so because they've moved all the engagement up to a non-mechanical level (sometimes in other elements, sometimes (as in OD&D) up to a kind of freeform sort of of parallel game). I think there's a distinct drop-off at each end with how much people find really simple or really complex games engaging on that level, which is why really complex RPGs are relatively rare, and to the degree they're successful, really simple games are either doing what I mention above, or are pursuing dramatist goals so the simplicity of the game experience is less relevant.
I feel reluctant to dismiss the possibility of finding RQ or ICE engaging or interesting, so if I adopt this definition must I be saying that the sole quality amounting to gamist design is play that is easy to do!? That feels like an impoverished definition (and I'd note the gap between the definition of gamist here and definitions of gamism elsewhere.)
Well, its admittedly my definition because I find it a more practical one (you can kind of point at it in work) than the one the Forge uses, and the one r.g.f.a. had was pretty vague because the number of heavy gamist participants in developing the model was very small (to the best of my knowledge, me and Gleichman). It existed because it obviously existed (there were people who were playing with a focus on things other than story, and other than exploring the world) but there weren't many people willing to chase it farther than that, and the two of us that were were less involved than the heavy duty dramatist and simulationist groups that were predominant. The Forge definitions are a little more specific (though I think flawed, as I've noted in my opinion about where genre emulation goes) but they also tend to be a bit more arcane.
The problem, anyway, is that in this thread many posters have said this or that element is gamist and not simulationist. I don't see how that can be judged unless they have a definition for gamist in mind that can be articulated and sustained. I guess folk could say something like - element X is uncategorisable, but certainly not simulationist. I don't think that is the sort of argument being made however. I think it is more of the form - element X can be categorised as gamist, and gamist is not simulationist, therefore element X is not simulationist. But if gamist isn't defined, the "therefore" in that sentence doesn't work because we can't rule out the union of G() and S().
I suspect they're saying that the element is neither simulationist nor dramatist/narrativist in intent, so it must be gamist in some cases (and keep in mind, its statistically likely some people in the thread consider gamism kind of a dirty word in regard to RPGs). That of course turns on you viewing all elements needing to fit in some incarnation of the three agendas, which I've always been agnostic about.